I've been working on a multi-cam sequence project in Premiere CS5. Last night there were a ton of issues with it requiring to be rendered in order to playback, even though previously it didnt require any rendering.
Today, I tried to open the project and it just won't open. I keep getting "an unkown error occured while opening project".
I have a lot of time invested in the project so far, and I dont want to start over.
Is there a way to recover the project?

I'm on Windows 7, Premiere CS5 5.03

Try creating a new project and importing the old project into it. If that doesn't work, try going to your Auto-Save location and opening one of your auto-saves, working backwards.

The rendering issues are likely unrelated. They're common, are likely related to audio, and have been discussed before.

Adam, thanks.

I tried importing the project and I get 2 choices.
Import entire project - results in error.
Import selected sequences - results in a progress bar loading that never loads all the way. The progress bar has been halfway for about 2 hours.

I have Auto Save off because I always thought I could not go back to an edit if I chose to undo something but it was autosaved.

I might have to start from scratch.

If you have access to somebody with a different platform version of Premiere, try opening it there (PC if done one Mac, and vice versa). This sometimes fixed our problems. If you don't have anybody, pm me, I might be able to help you tomorrow.

Ooh, too bad about the autosave. It has autosaved my bacon many times. Turn it on and trust it. It will never hurt your ability to undo an edit.

This probably isn't it but it is possible you have a corrupt media cache database or rendered file somewhere.

Try this:

Open your new project and go to Project Settings. In one of the windows will be settings pertaining to media cache and media cache database locations. Change the locations (they shouldn't be on your C: drive anyway, which is where they default to. Premiere should ask you whether you want to move them or delete them. Choose delete.

If this doesn't help, try going to the folder where you have your corrupt project located and try deleting the sub-folder where you have your rendered files located. This will force it to re-render all the rendered files. When you try to open the project it will ask where a bunch of rendered files are; tell it to skip all.

This might work.

Also, try holding down the SHIFT key when you start Premiere until it asks you which project you want to open; this forces it to re-register all the plug-ins.