How to relink missing media in a video project

When media goes missing, Video by Zaweba marks the clips that used it as Media offline rather than deleting them, so your edit is still there. To bring the files back, choose File > Relink and point it at the folder where the footage now lives. It searches that folder by file name and reconnects every clip it finds, so the project plays as before.

Missing media is one of the most common shocks in video editing, and it almost never means anything is lost. A project file doesn't contain your footage; it points to where the footage was. Move a folder, rename a drive, unplug an external disk or open the project on another PC, and those pointers no longer lead anywhere.

Why files go offline

The usual causes are mundane. You tidied your Videos folder after starting the project. An external drive came back with a different letter. You copied the project to a laptop but left the footage behind. Or a file was renamed, which breaks the link even though it is in the same place.

Knowing which of these happened tells you where to point Relink.

Reconnecting the files

Open the project. Clips whose files can't be found are shown as Media offline. Your cuts, titles, effects and grades are untouched.

Find the footage. Locate the folder that now holds the files, on whichever drive it is on. If the drive is external, plug it in first.

Choose File > Relink and pick that folder. Video by Zaweba searches it by file name and reconnects matching clips.

Play the timeline through. Check that the right clips came back. If anything is still offline, the files are in another folder or have been renamed; run Relink again on the other folder, or rename the file back to what it was.

Avoiding it next time

Keep a project's media in one folder. If every file the project uses lives under one project folder, moving or copying that folder keeps everything together and Relink becomes a one-step fix.

Use the Project manager. File > Project manager can collect everything a project uses into one place. That is the cleanest way to move a project to another PC or archive it.

Copy camera footage in rather than editing from the card. Importing a camera card with ingest settings copies the files into your media folder, so the project never points at a card that later gets reformatted.

Rename before importing, not after. Renaming a file that is already in a project is one of the quickest ways to make it go offline.

Related situations

Footage that is still being recorded behaves differently. If a recording was still growing when you imported it, Refresh growing files re-reads it so the clip picks up the new length; that is not the same as relinking.

Timelines imported from other editors may come in partly offline too. An imported .otio, XML, FCPXML, EDL or AAF opens in a new tab, and files that weren't sent along arrive offline, ready to relink in exactly the same way.

Finally, if nothing will relink because the files really are gone, check your backups before anything else. Your timeline is safe in the project, and Video by Zaweba also autosaves every minute, so as soon as the footage turns up again, Relink puts it all back together.

Video by Zaweba is free software that runs offline on Windows, with no account, so your projects and media stay on your own drives.