Project file corruption
Also known as: corrupted project, damaged project file
The state where an editing project file will not open or opens damaged, losing the structure of an edit while the footage itself is fine.
Updated
What it means
A project file holds decisions, not footage. Corrupting it loses cuts, grades and titles, and loses nothing of what the camera recorded. That distinction is the only comfort available.
Causes are mundane. A crash during a save, a full disk, a drive disconnected mid-write, or a file kept on a network share that lost its connection. None of them are exotic, and all of them happen on ordinary afternoons.
It is a different failure from Offline media, which is a project that opens and cannot find its clips. One loses the edit; the other loses only the links between the edit and its footage.
How it works in practice
Autosave is the whole defence. Every application keeps versioned backups, and finding where they live before they are needed is a ten-minute job done once. Nobody does it on the day it matters.
Working from a local disk avoids the common cause. A project on an External drive is fine; a project on a NAS being written over a network is a risk taken for convenience.
Versioned saves beat autosave for big changes. A copy named before a restructure means the previous shape is still available, which autosave does not reliably give you when it matters.
What to watch out for
The loss is discovered at the worst moment, which is reopening a project to finish it. Nothing warns while the damage is being written, and the file reports success while already being wrong.
Plugins make recovery harder. A project that needs six effects to open is a project with six more ways to fail, and removing them is a normal first diagnostic.
Rebuilding is slower than it looks. The cuts can be recreated from a Rough cut in an hour; the grade and the small trims are where the real Editing time went.
How RawClip handles it
No project file sits between the footage and the delivered result, so there is nothing of that kind to corrupt. The output is a finished video file, and the source footage remains the only thing genuinely worth backing up.