Premiere Puts Every Audio Cut Back at the Start

You spent days cutting one long recording into pieces so each person had a track. You reopen the project and every piece still has the right length, and every piece plays from the start of the file. The autosaves do it too, once they have been opened and saved after the failure. The edit of who-said-what is gone. The timing of the clips is all that remained.

What happened

Premiere can lose the source in-point on clips that came from one file and were split apart, in projects where text-based editing and transcription have been used. The clip on the timeline keeps its duration and forgets where in the master that duration began, so it starts at 00:00. Saving after that writes the damage into the autosave you thought was a backup.

Look for an autosave dated before the transcription pass, and open a copy of it. If every autosave was opened after the in-points reset, they all contain the reset. There is nothing in the clip to recover. The master file is still intact. The cuts have to be made again.

Keep the next cut

Once a section is right, select those clips and use Render and Replace. Premiere writes each piece to its own file and the timeline points at those files. A later bug in the original master cannot move the in-point, because there is no shared in-point left. Do this before you run text-based editing across a timeline built from one long recording.