AE CC Mac: After Effects Collect Files not collecting some files, including project!

I suffered a lot for this and I'd like to help. This worked for me: https://forums.adobe.com/message/6502777#6502777

My problem was that AE was always alerting me about missing footage, obviously the problem was not about missing footage, because in the Project Panel there was no missing footage (note that if this is happening After Effects stop the entire process, so copying the “missing footage” will not solve it. Also: When the Generating Report Only checkbox was active this error never occurred. I figured it out that the real problem was about file names too long. Online I found some articles and discussion confirming that the problem should be because of characters file names, paths, folder structure, special characters, etc. A clue come from the point Unicode conversion for robust support for characters (in file names, paths, etc.) of this old article: http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2013/04/whats-new-changed-after-effects-next.html So to recap try to ensure that in your Project Panel none of the file names is too long (I don't know which is exactly the limit), is containing special characters, and try to simplify your folder structure. In details I solved it following this steps (obviously the first three steps are to reduce, clean and simplify the project if it has a lot of files, folders and/or if it’s a complete mess): Reduce Project selecting just the really needed compositions to get rid of what I don't need Run the Project Cleaner script (http://aescripts.com/project-cleaner/) to get rid of redundancies and for a deep cleaning Run the OrganizeProjectAssets script http://provideocoalition.com/dtorno/video/organize-project-assets-free-after-effects-scrip t - to simplify the folder structure Manual double check to the file names Collect Files

Hope this will help.

Edit: Be careful when reducing and cleaning projects with expressions

I'm having the same issue at work. We tried on two computers that have Mavericks, and one that hasn't been upgraded and it WORKED! on CC. SO Adobe whats the problem? how come you haven't been responding????

I thought the work-around might be to click "OK" for the error message and then manually add the missing file into the collected project folder, however this DOES NOT WORK either. When I attempted this, a whole host of other files were also not collected, WITHOUT AN ERROR MESSAGE. I just sent a large collected project to a client who was rightfully angry to find missing files. The client now has to email me the file names so I can find them one-by-one and then deliver seperately.

The issue is deeper than the punctuation in the file name suggestions. This thread started on February 2nd and after 3 months the problem is STILL NOT ANSWERED. My workflow depends on the ability to collect projects and deliver to clients. Adobe needs to fix this immediately.  

Specs:

AE CC 12.2.1.5

OS X 10.9.3, Mavericks

16 GB Ram 1333 MHz DDR3

Same problem here.

Mac OSX Mavericks 10.9.2 running After Effects CS 5.5 (Both fully updated)

The actual illustrator file that is mentioned in the error pop-up collects but the project can't link to it and the collection process is terminated.

It's got nothing to do with punctuation etc. I'm having this issue with files like faces.ai and grid.ai

Something I will add to this. There seems to be something wrong in general with linking to AI files because they sometimes just loose connection to the files just scrolling through a comp.

Definately a bug. Tried the for all comps trick but this doesn't work in AE CS6.  I have the same problem with both AE CS6 and CC on OSX 10.9.2

Really very annoying as I use this to clean up projects. Worked fine before I updated.

I ran into the same problem yesterday on my iMac. I tried moving the files to a higher file structure and renaming longer file names thinking the long path names were the issue, but that did not work. I ended up moving my project to my older MBPro running Lion. Collecting worked like a charm on my laptop. Could this be a Mavericks issue?

Here are my system specs:

** DID NOT COLLECT : Late 2013 iMac 27" 3.5 gHz i7 32GB Ram - OSX Mavericks 10.9.2 (AE CC 12.2.1.5)

** WORKED FINE : Early 2011 MBPro 17" 2.2GHz i7 4GB Ram - OSX Lion 10.7.5 (AE CC 12.2.0.52)

You have not provided any proper technical info like exact AE version, project info, file types, storage locations, file naming conventions and a million other things.

Mylenium