Solved: How to Relink Missing Media in Premiere Pro

What do you do if you can’t link media in Premiere Pro? In this tutorial, you’ll learn a couple of ways to relink missing footage or other assets in your projects. While this isn’t the most fun of tutorials, it’s handy to understand for troubleshooting purposes and use in your everyday workflows. Especially if you’re new to Premiere Pro. So, let’s get started!

Part 1: How to Relink Missing Media Assets

If you open up a project and get a message about your missing media, fret not! We’ll take you step-by-step on the best approach to fix these errors: 

There are events when you try to open a project, and it throws an error all because of the missing assets. 

1. The first step is to click on Locate on the pop-up window that points out the missing media.
2. On the left-hand side, you’ll notice a bunch of folders. Navigate to your Motion Directory (this will be specific to what you’ve named it). 
3. Now, on the bottom right-hand corner of the dialogue box, click Search. Searching will review your media folders to locate the clip you’re looking for. 
4. Once you have found that, highlight the clip, and click on OK. 
5. Selecting OK will relink all of the footage. 
6. As Adobe Premiere Pro is doing this, it will also be able to find out various other assets that might be missing from the same folder. If it finds all of them, all is well and good. 
7. However, if it doesn’t, click on Locate again and Search all the folders again. Repeat this step until all of your missing media are located. Now, you should be able to proceed again with your edits, error-free. 

Part 2: Steps to Resolve the Offline Error Message

Let’s say you already have a project open, and you see a media offline error message. Here’s how to fix that: 

1. Go to the Project Panel. 
2. The best way to locate offline media is to search the word Offline in the project panel. This will pop up all of the offline media. 
3. Highlight all of the offline media from the search results.
4. Right-click and select Relink. 
5. You’ll see the Locate box come up again. 
6. Click on Locate and Search the main folder like the steps above. 
7. Once the file is found, click OK.
8. This will relink all the media, and you’ll be good to go! 

When you’re new to Premiere Pro, these error messages can seem daunting. But as we’ve shown you, relinking media in Premiere Pro doesn’t need to be a big interruption as you video edit. We hope you found these two ways to resolve this issue helpful. If you have any questions, comments, or tips, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments below.