Re-association Tips for Premiere Pro Productions

8 min readDec 13, 2024

Avoiding Broken Clip Associations When Moving Source Clips
Avoiding Broken Associations While Migrating a Stand-Alone Project into a Production
Basic Re-association Steps
Duplicates and Re-Association
Advanced Clip Re-association and Duplicate Removal

Overview

With the advent of the Productions workflow within Adobe’s Premiere Pro editors can now freely organize source clips and timelines into different projects under the umbrella of a single production. A source clip in one project can be cut into a timeline in a different project. This has huge benefits, but brings a new complication for editor and software alike. Both have to keep track of the relationships between clips used in various timelines and their source clips in various source projects. In some cases these relationships can break without the editor being aware. When this happens, the show can go on, but you may encounter some issues:

changes to source clip effects or label colors will not be applied in timelines
“Reveal in Project” command will not work making it hard to quickly access a source clip or other clips from the same shoot
multiple instances of a clip might result in duplicates of the source clip
Markers applied to a clip in a timeline may not appear on the source clip or other instances of the same clip

Though Adobe has said little out loud about this issue, they have offered a tool to repair broken connections in the form of the Reassociate Source Clips command under the Edit menu. From this we can derive the term “association” as the technical word for the connect between the source clip in a project and an instance of that clip in a timeline. (This concept of “association” should not be confused with “linking” and “relinking” which refer to the connections between a clip in the project and the video file on your hard drive.) You can tell how much confidence Adobe has in this reassociate tool by this line in their white paper:

This command, while powerful, is not intended to be a common part of Production workflows but rather to help in rare cases when projects have been reorganized or disrupted

In other words, “if it doesn’t work, good luck.”

Avoiding Broken Clip Associations When Moving Source Clips

The most common reason clip associations break is because source clips have been moved from one project to another after they’ve been edited into a timeline. If the project containing a timeline is closed while moving source clips between two projects, the clip instances in that timeline will not “see” the move and assume the source clips are in their original location. In this case using “Reveal in Project” will lead premiere to look — unsuccessfully — in the original location of the source clip.

To avoid broken associations when moving source clips open all edit projects or at least those that might contain references to those source clips before moving the source clips between projects. This will ensure all projects “see” the move and keep associations in tact.

Sometimes broken associations will persist or arise for other reasons.

Avoiding Broken Associations While Migrating a Stand-Alone Project into a Production

If you are migrating an edit from a stand-alone project into a production you will likely want to re-organize your source media into multiple new source projects. If the project was well organized in the first place, this can be a very smooth process.

If it is a large messy project with lots of duplicate clips and disorganized source folders you will want to be especially delicate in setting up the production.

Either way, these are helpful steps to follow:

Create a new empty production and then use “Import Project into Production” to add the entire original stand-alone project. (This will add a copy of the project into the production, leaving your original stand-alone project file untouched in case you need to go back to it for any reason.)
Create new projects for source media, and drag and drop the source media from the original project into the new source projects. DO NOT COPY AND PASTE from the original project. If there are already duplicates of any clips, don’t drag over the duplicates. DO NOT move any timelines until all source media has been organized into new source projects.
Save All
Create new projects for your sequences and then drag and drop all your sequences from the original project into the new sequence projects.
Any sequences that are no longer needed can be left behind. (They can still be imported from the original stand-alone project if they are needed later).
Save All
[optional] Close the original project and move it to the trash. (Don’t empty the trash. You just want to remove it from Premiere’s view for the moment.)
Open your sequences one at a time and spot-check clip associations using “Reveal in Project”. Try checking clips from different shoot dates, or sources as well as different types of media like music, graphics, sound effects. If the migration was successful premiere will show you the correct clips in the newly created source projects.
If “Reveal in Project” fails, check to see if the clip is in fact in one of your new source projects. If not, then it probably got left behind in the original project, in which case you can drag the original project out of the trash, open it, and then move those clips to the new source project.
If “Reveal in Project” fails and you are certain the corresponding clip is in one of the new source projects then you have a broken association. Try the following basic re-association steps, then, if needed, move on to the advanced re-associations steps below.

Basic Re-association Steps

Broken associations can easily go unnoticed, until you select a clip in a timeline and attempt to “Reveal in Project”. If the association is broken you will get this message:

The offer to search in other open projects usually unhelpful:

To repair the broken association try these steps:

Find the source clip yourself and make sure the project containing that source clip is open.
In the timeline, select the clip and then go Edit>Reassociate Source Clips.
Premiere will prompt you to identify the project file containing the source clip as it appears in Finder(Mac)/Explorer(Windows).
That’s it. There are no additional options and there is no confirmation that the re-association worked or didn’t work. You can “Reveal in Project” again to see if the association is repaired. If not, skip ahead to the advanced tips below.
NOTE: These same steps apply if you are trying to fix associations for multiple clips at once. Premiere will attempt to re-associate anything selected to the project you identify. Even if only a few clips have association issues you can freely select additional clips or even “Select All” for a whole timeline. Premiere will only save new associations for the clips it finds in the identified project leaving everything else unchanged. IE it will not harm existing, healthy associations.

Duplicates and Re-Association

Premiere is notorious for creating duplicates when importing edits from one editor to another in a stand alone project. As these duplicates accumulate a lot of editors will simply drag them into a single folder that they ignore. If you are migrating a project with lots of duplicates into a production you may want to leave behind these duplicates to avoid perpetuating the clutter. However, any clip instances in your timeline that came from these duplicates will still associate back to the duplicate source clip. If the dupes were left behind during the migration, a “Reveal in Project” will fail to find a source clip.

At this point your options are to bring along the duplicates and accept the resultant clutter or to use the re-associate tool to try to link all clip instances back to a single set of source clips. If you are as fastidious as I am about project organization, you will try the latter option using these advanced re-association steps.

Advanced Clip Re-Association and Duplicate Removal

If you’ve identified broken clip associations, and the basic steps above are unsuccessful, try the follow steps.

Open the timeline containing broken associations and the source project containing your primary source clips(IE the source clips you want your timeline to associate to).
Select any clips that may have broken associations and go to Edit>Generate Source Clips. This will create new source clips for all selected clips. The new source clips will appear in the same project as your timeline.
Move the newly generated source clips into the source project containing the primary source clips. Put them in a “Duplicates” folder to keep track of these new source clips.
Next select Edit>Consolidate duplicates. Hopefully most of the clips in the “Duplicates” folder will disappear. If there are any clips left it means one of two things: either the clip was NOT already in the source project as it should have been OR there is a difference in the clip settings or metadata between your duplicate and the primary clip that is making Premiere think they are distinct clips. The next steps can help eliminate these differences.
Select all source clips and right click>Proxy>Detach Proxies. (you can reattach them later)
Select all clips and right click>Make Offline… then re-link all clips. Check the file path of the duplicates and the primary source clip to ensure they are showing the same file path. If there are difference in the file path, repeat the re-link for the duplicates one at a time to make sure they are linking to the correct file path.
Check the Color settings for both copies of the clip and remove Input LUTs if applied inconsistently.
Repeat Edit>Consolidate duplicates.
For any remaining duplicates, find the clip instance in the timeline, remove the duplicate from the primary source project an repeat the basic Reassociate Source Clips steps to the primary source project.
If the clip instance in the timeline still fails to associate to your primary source clip, you can consider manually overcutting the duplicate instance with the primary source clip. If the clip is being used extensively this may be infeasible. If the duplicate instance only appears once or twice, this can be a quick and easy way to eliminate duplicates and restore healthy associations.
If all else fails, you may need to keep both instances of a source clip. In this case move the duplicate next to the primary clip and change the label color to distinguish between the two. Choose a bright color so it stands out. This color should show throughout your timelines anytime this duplicate is in use. As you continue editing try to avoid working with the brightly colored duplicates to minimize their use for the duration of the edit.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to contact with questions or feedback. — Jeff