Adobe Premiere: Re-linking converted media with a new extension

You might’ve read my blog post about converting MOV files to MP4 with FFMPEG. Now, before converting these files I was already working on a project in Premiere. The MOV files were impossible to work with so I ended up converting them.

But, the clips were already cut down as they should and I definitely didn’t feel like re-doing all of that work with these new files. So I started looking around for other options. I bumped into a forum topic about this subject and found a solution there.

The solution

• Find your project.prproj file
• Rename it to project.zip (make sure to replace the extension)
• Unpack the ZIP file
• Open the unpacked file in a text editor (like TextEdit, Visual Studio Code or something else)
• Use the search and replace function to replace .mov (in my case) to .mp4
• Save the file, and open the file in Premiere
• You’re good to go!