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Missing media

What happens when a project opens and a linked video or audio file is gone, and how relinking gets a clip working again.

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Video and Audio layers are not embedded in a project: the .cls stores the file path, the clip layout and the trims, and reads the actual media from wherever that path points. Move the file, rename it or delete it, and the link breaks. See The .cls project file for what is embedded and what is only linked.

Why the dialog appears

Every time a project is opened, Celas Studio checks the saved path of every Video and Audio layer. Any layer whose file can no longer be found there is collected into one Missing Media dialog, which opens automatically once loading finishes. Newly imported media never triggers it, because the file obviously exists at the moment you import it.

The dialog lists one card per missing file: the file name, the path it was saved with, and a Browse button. The message at the top is direct about it: "These media files could not be found. Browse to relink each:"

The Missing Media dialog with two cards, each showing a file name, its saved path and a Browse button.

Relinking a file

  1. Click Browse on the card for the file you want to fix.
  2. Find the file in its new location and confirm. Video accepts mp4, mov, avi, mkv and webm; audio accepts mp3, wav, ogg, flac, aac, m4a, ac3, opus and wma.
  3. The card disappears from the list once the file loads successfully.
  4. Repeat for any other card. The dialog closes on its own once every card is gone.

If the file you pick cannot be read (the wrong format, or a corrupted file), the card stays and turns red with "Could not read this file. Try another." Pick a different file and try again.

Each relink counts as its own undo step, so Ctrl+Z after closing the dialog reverses the most recent one first.

What Skip leaves behind

Skip dismisses every remaining card at once and closes the dialog. Any layer you had not yet relinked keeps pointing at the path that failed: the link is not repaired, and the layer is left broken.

Skip clears the list for the rest of the session, and the dialog has no other way to reopen. If you skip by mistake, or skip meaning to come back to one file later, close the project without saving and reopen it: that runs the missing-file check again and brings the dialog back for whatever is still unresolved.

When the file has changed length

A relink does not just swap the path: it re-probes the file you picked and reconciles every clip already on that layer against what it actually contains now. If the new file is shorter than the one that was linked before, each clip's length is clamped down to fit it. Any trim that would have gone negative is reset to zero, and a trim that would have collapsed a clip to nothing is reset back to the full clip instead of leaving an empty, unplayable range.

That reconciliation is what keeps a relinked clip visible on the canvas rather than rendering blank: without it, a clip trimmed against a file that no longer matches would collapse to zero length.

For everything else about how clips, trims and splits work once media is linked, see Importing video and audio.