Inspiring

JSON in After Effects balloons project and prevents AE from opening

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
December 8, 2022
4 replies
298 views

I have created a simple AE project in AE 2022.6 and 2023 on a Mac M1 running Monterey. The project contains a 54 minute .mp3 audio file (69 MB), a sequence containing the audio file and a text field, and a .json file (1.3 MB) -- the AE project is 89 KB - this project opens fine. If I drag the .json file into the seqence, it takes several minutes and when I save the AE project is 283.1 MB. At this point I can't re-open the AE project without AE hanging. Is this expected? Is there a limit on the size of the .json file that AE can manage in a sequence? Why does the program balloon so big if the .json file is only 1.3 MB? I am attaching the project that opens (without the .json in the sequence) and can supply the .json file if needed.

testsyncbasicwJSONinProject.zip

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JohnColombo17100380

Community Manager

Thank you for the follow-up reply, @Reveal Video Team! I'm glad you're able to see the performance difference so quickly.

Something to keep in mind with this workaround: because the JSON file is not in the Timeline, AE does not know it is a dependency of the project. This is another piece we need to improve, in order to avoid the JSON being removed if you collect the project or send the output to Media Encoder.

If you need to render any of the comps using the JSON in Media Encoder, I would recommend opening the After Effects project in Media Encoder via the File menu and selecting the comps you want to render. This avoids the need for AME to reduce the project and therefore avoids removing the JSON from the project, as it would if you used the "Send to AME" commands from within After Effects.

Thanks again,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

R

Reveal Video TeamAuthor

Inspiring

Thank you - what a huge difference! When the json is not in the comp then everything is very snappy! And it deals with the scale of my json (which admittedly is not small) very smoothly!

JohnColombo17100380

Community Manager

Hi @Reveal Video Team,

Thanks for posting about this issue. We are aware that adding large data files, like JSON, to the Timeline drastically increases project file size & save/load time. This is due to how many properties are being added to the Timeline by the data file. We are planning to improve on this in a future version for large data sets.

In the current version, you can workaround this issue by reducing the size of the JSON or referencing the current JSON directly in the project without adding it to the Timeline. You can link directly to the JSON footage item using the following expression link:

footage("YourDataFile.json").sourceData["KeyName"];

The "KeyName" and following references may vary based on the structure of your JSON, nesting, etc. If you can post a sample, I can provide an example more specific to your JSON.

Once a fix is available for this issue, we will update this thread.

Thanks again for reporting this issue,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

Mylenium

Legend

a) AE is not a long form editor/ podcast creation tool.

b) MP3s in AE are fundamentally evil, even more so the longer they are.

c) A 1.3 MB text file can contain an entire 500 page book.

Now take your pick of what your points of failure could be. As for the text - AE would duplicate the text string used to actually render the text and store it as its own data and of course there are limits in JavaScript/ JSON how to access your file and it's data. Arrays cannot have more than 1024 entries, so at 1025 things go boom. That alone would and should be reason enough to split you hunky text file into smaller, more manageable segments and link them individually to their text layers.

Mylenium

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