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Inspiring
January 22, 2019
Question

Footage Won't Render, Audio Clips Are Fine

  • January 22, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 253 views

I was working on a video edit in After Effects and while I was trying to playback to see some transitions and clips I had added, the program malfunctioned. It now won't render any of the clips I have laid out, it will just display a black screen while the audio plays, and the bar that turns green/blue/black to indicate whether clips are rendered or not will not change. Usually when the bar isn't green the clips will still playback just very slow it will distort my audio clip until it has rendered out, now the audio plays through fine but the clips just won't render at all. This problem has now transferred to all my current and past projects, I tried opening another one to see if I had perhaps just used a corrupted file in this particular project, but that does not seem to be the case.

I can't tell if this is a problem with my storage or whether I accidentally put After Effects in a mode that I was unaware of? It may be something I can just turn off?

My edit is 1920 x 1080

Frame Rate: 29.97 fps (has been working fine for the last few weeks)

I'm using MP4 files for my clips

I've already tried clearing my disk cache, I deleted about 20gb worth of files from my computer and moved them to an external hard drive, and I've restarted the program several times as well as updating it.

Has anyone encountered anything like this before? I tried searching for help but the problems I found that were similar to this were in Premiere not After Effects.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 22, 2019

In troubleshooting the footage, check how it plays in the Footage panel.  If it appears as expected in the Footage panel, then you know that AE sees your footage.  If it's not appearing as expected in the Footage panel, you'll need to take a closer look at why this is the case.  Try transcoding one clip to Apple ProRes422 (LT) in Adobe Media Encoder and then import that (if using an older version of AE on Windows, try GoPro Cinerform 3).  (This is what Rick suggested above, but you can test one clip rather than do all of them.)  Since you mentioned that it's happening to all of your projects, it's worth taking look at anything that may or may not have changed at the system level (like drivers) or the application level (did you update AE?).

Of course, also check for something obvious like accidentally hiding the layer visibility, accidentally position the layers outside the visible area of the Composition, accidentally enabling Preserve Layer Transparency, accidentally applying a Mask that hides the picture, etc.

It may also help to reset the preferences (I would do this last).

For what it's worth, I almost always transcode footage that isn't already using a mezzanine CODEC (like Apple ProRes, GoPro Cineform, or Avid DNxHD).  The one exception is 1st generation H264/H265 (usually a .mp4) for social media.

-Warren

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 22, 2019

MP4 is not a production format. There are hundreds of different ways to generate an MP4. Try transcoding the clips to a production format using one of the pre-sets in the AME. That almost always solves the problem.

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