Audio just stopped and went away.

I was working on a particular project last week and all was fine. I worked on others in the meantime and now this morning when I opened the project the main soundtrack (Audio 3) has half disappeared - please see attached.



This is not the first time this has happened. OK, with a bit of work I can replace it but if this is a known phenonmena then for the future I'd like to avoid doing whatever it is I'm doing wrong.

I have the very latest version of PrePro, all files are on an external Caldigit AV Drive with masses of free space and I'm using either an up-to-date iMac or this year's MacBook Pro depending on availability.

Thanks in advance for any guidance etc.

PP 5.5.2, iMac 24 3.06 8GB OSX 10.7 MBP 17", 2.3 GHz 8GB. Near Geneva, Switzerland

Thanks but unfortunately the problem remains.

I wonder if I'm doing this right:

I went out of Premiere and in Finder I went down the path: me, Documents, Adobe, Premiere Pro and under that I moved the entire directory "5.5" to trash.

I went back into Premiere, Premiere Pro, Preferences, Media, pressed the Clean button, OK, exit Premiere Pro, Restart machine.

I created a new project and using the Media Browser I Imported the file, right click, New Sequence from Clip, but the audio stops in exactly the same place.

In desperation I started up Final Cut Pro and did a Log and Transfer and once that had finished the created clip (about 50 mins long) is just fine. So it has to be some other pointer in Premiere that I need to delete/reset or whatever which has become screwed up for this particular clip. I have three other clips (from three other camcorders used at the same performance) and they are just fine. Please, any more ideas?

PP 5.5.2, iMac 24 3.06 8GB OSX 10.7 MBP 17", 2.3 GHz 8GB. Near Geneva, Switzerland

I wonder if you could possibly expand a little on that, please. I have the problem in the current project and the clip ends up with exactly the same problem in a brand new project having trashed and cleaned everything I could. Thanks.

PP 5.5.2, iMac 24 3.06 8GB OSX 10.7 MBP 17", 2.3 GHz 8GB. Near Geneva, Switzerland

Unfortunately that didn't do it either. What I did do was to copy the footage from the backup (hooray!) and Imported that, watched it 'Conform' and it's there OK.

However, as FCP worked well with that original clip (Log and Transfer feature created a perfect clip) in the end I imported the audio from the FCP created file. At the moment it seems safer to work with physical files rather than whatever it is that Premiere uses between what I see in the Sequence and those AVCHD .MTS files on the HDD. This is, after all, the second time this has happened in two independent projects in recent weeks and I've only been using Premiere for six months or so. I'm not saying that FCP is any good either: I've had projects where even when using a physical file the sound track pointers (or whatever it uses) have become totally messed up and audio from different parts of a show has been playing with unrelated video. That simply involved dragging a new copy of the clip involved onto the sequence and repeating a whole lot of edits but at least, despite all the extra work, I got it going with little fuss.

Premiere has to have some sort of pointer that says "audio ends here". I wish I knew how to delete it and force Premiere to start again with it's Conforming and whatever else it does before a clip is ready to edit.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

PP 5.5.2, iMac 24 3.06 8GB OSX 10.7 MBP 17", 2.3 GHz 8GB. Near Geneva, Switzerland