"The project appears to be damaged; it cannot be opened"
Premiere Pro shows this when it can't read the project file to its end or finds something in it that doesn't fit. The usual causes:
- The save was cut off. Premiere Pro crashed, the computer lost power or the disk filled up while the project was being written. The file then stops early.
- The file was synced half way. A cloud folder (Creative Cloud Files, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive) replaced the project with an unfinished copy. The file has the right size, but its end, or all of it, is zeros.
- A part of the file was damaged on a failing drive or card: a block in the middle is zeros or noise, and everything after it can't be read by Premiere Pro.
What this tool does with it
Upload the .prproj above. The result page shows which of these happened and how much of the
project is still in the file. A project is made of thousands of small parts (bins, clips, sequences,
tracks, effects) that point at each other. Every part that is intact is kept exactly as Premiere Pro
wrote it; the damaged ones are left out, and so is anything that pointed at a lost part, so the
repaired project is consistent and opens. The page tells you what was left out.
Look for older copies too
Premiere Pro saves Auto-Save copies every few minutes, by default in an "Adobe Premiere Pro
Auto-Save" folder next to the project. Upload those together with the damaged project, or the whole
folder as a .zip: each copy is checked, and the page names the most complete one. The report also
lists the version history of cloud folders, Windows Previous Versions and Time Machine.
When nothing can be recovered
A file that is zeros from start to finish, or empty, holds nothing of the project, and no program can rebuild it. The page says so plainly rather than handing you an empty project.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Premiere Pro Project Repair and Version Converter (PRPROJ).