After Effects 23.6 and 24.0 Not Starting on MacOS 14/Sonoma

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
October 7, 2023
75 replies
48985 views

Issue

Users upgrading to MacOS Sonoma (version 14) may find that After Effects will not startup and will report errors such as:

After Effects can't continue: internal structure inconsistency (g) ( 25 :: 2 )
After Effects error: globals unborn. ( 21 :: 3 )
After Effects can't continue: unexpected failure during application startup
After Effects can't continue: ... check for permissions or other error messages

Users may also find installed plugins are failing to load or exports from the Render Queue are failing in ways they did not before upgrading to Sonoma.

Resolution

The cause of the issue appears to be Sonoma adjusting the permissions and access to folders that After Effects requires to run. These include:

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore
/Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/[Version]
/Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/[com.Adobe.After Effects.23x-24.plist(s)]

To check for the appropriate permissions:

Navigate to /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0

Right-click on the MediaCore folder and choose Get Info from the context menu.
Open the Sharing & Permissions section and make sure “everyone” has at least Read Only Privilege set.
If the account you are launching After Effects with is listed in the Name column, make sure it has at least the Read Privilege set as well.

Navigate to /Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/
- Right-click on the appropriate [Version] folder and choose Get Info from the context menu.
- Ensure Locked is not checked. Uncheck it if necessary.
- Open the Sharing & Permissions section and ensure the account you using to launch After Effects has both the Read & Write Privilege.

If after completing steps 1 & 2 After Effects will still not load, please make a backup of the above folders, then delete the folders at the paths above. Then uninstall and re-install After Effects.

Additional Step, thanks to @Mike Wills Makes

3. Navigate to /Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/

Find the com.Adobe.After Effects.23*.plist files
Backup a copy of them to a safe location
Delete the files.
Repeat these steps for any com.Adobe.After Effects.24*.plist files

Troubleshooting

Show previous replies

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Erwin Bik

Participant

This morning again AE freezed my entire system, but instead of uninstalling and reinstalling, I only removed all After Effects preference files and the folder 24.0 under users/[name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects. After that I could restart AE again. In the preference folders there also where some txt files (i'm not sure if they where logs) but if Adobe is interested I saved those and can share them with them.

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Dmitry33637198hybv

Participant

Yesterday I spent the whole night with the Adobe remote support service - we checked everything we could and the problem still exist - mac continues to shut down after a while. We couldn't rich the decision of a problem but today I had an interesting thought - I see that my CPU gets really hot when i am using AE - can it be some problem in optimisation - that maybe riching some hot point the system just crashes? I really want to find an answer and even support service can't do it. It is really annoying to start using Adobe programms legally and just get crashing piece of nothing.

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Dmitry33637198hybv

Participant

Thanks for the answer! It happen all the times as you told - AE freezes (whole system freezes) on basic actions - like choosing layer or navigating through timeline and computer restarts (if I don't do hard reset earlier). When after restart I try to open AE the error message appears. But on second or third attempt to open AE it opens and works well some time untill the whole system freezes again. Cleaning preferences, plists, etc - doesn't help either. I don't have any plugins installed so it can't be the problem. Do someone else have such problem?

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Erwin Bik

Participant

Over the last few weeks (since i've upgraded to MacOS 14) and around the same time to AE24 the application freezes frequently and will not restart.

After this I need to uninstall AE24 - manually delete all preference files and the Cache folders com.adobe.AfterEffects & After Effects. Reboot the system (just to be sure) and re-install the application. A time consuming fix, not counting the work that needs to be re-done before the crash :-).

Hope that Adobe will resolve this bug soon!

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jenkmeister17177426

Author

The plist files are meant to be there. They are generated automatically and contain information about the plugins you have installed (so AE doesn't have to scan them every time) along with some other instrumentation data. The issue seems to be AE being able to read the plist files on MacOS 14. I've checked the sample plist files that have been sent to me, and there is nothing wrong with the contents, so I'm led back to the permission to read them being blocked by the OS. When you open them or delete them, the permissions are being reset and allowing AE to start up again. We are trying to reproduce the issue internally but haven't been able to as yet.

M

Mike Wills Makes

Participant

@Dmitry33637198hybv Once AE has crashed have you looked in the preference folder to see if any more plist files have respawned? This has happened to me a couple of times now. Everything is fine until the moment new plist files are generated and stored in the preference folder. This results in my system bricking to the point where i need to force shut down. Once i boot back up, all apps i have opened before the crash will reopen, but AE can't relaunch and i get the same error message reported here. Then i need to navigate back to the preferences folder and delete the new plist files and AE will work again... right up until it happens all over again.

J

jenkmeister17177426

Author

@Dmitry33637198hybv Crashing after a few minutes doesn't sound like the "not starting up issue". Perhaps you can start a new thread and provide some details on what you're doing before the crash, any other info you have?

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Dmitry33637198hybv

Participant

Still doesn't work. I use AE 24 on Sonoma and it still crashes after a couple of minutes - only hrad reset can help. It is really annoying, I tryed deleting all plist files, changed all permisions, reinstalled everything I could and it still crashes.