A Premiere Pro project file that is all zeros
Sometimes a project has the right size, hundreds of kilobytes or many megabytes, but Premiere Pro calls it damaged and a hex editor shows nothing but zeros. That happens when the file system had reserved the space for the file but the data never arrived: the computer slept or lost power during a save, or a cloud folder created the file and was stopped before it filled it in.
What the tool checks
Upload the .prproj. The result page tells you exactly what is in it:
- zeros from start to finish: nothing of the project was written, and no program can get it back from this file;
- zeros at the end: the project was written part of the way. Everything before the zeros is recovered into a project that opens, and the page says how much that is;
- a block of zeros in the middle: everything before it is recovered (in a project saved uncompressed, the parts after it as well).
Where the project may still be
The report lists the places to look for a copy written before the damage:
- the "Adobe Premiere Pro Auto-Save" folder (File > Project Settings > Scratch Disks shows where it
is); upload the newest copies, or the whole folder as a
.zip, and the most complete one is named; - the version history of Creative Cloud Files, OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox;
- Windows Previous Versions (right-click the file, Properties) or Time Machine on a Mac.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Premiere Pro Project Repair and Version Converter (PRPROJ).