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silicontrip17362016
Known Participant
October 22, 2021
Question

Windows freeze opening Mac After Effects projects

  • October 22, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 252 views

We're having an issue when opening Mac saved projects on a Windows machine using AE 2020 on both.

 

The first issue is the asset paths not being in the same format, which AE eventually sorts out after a few minutes but this is only a minor issue.

 

The main issue is when there are items in the Render queue, AE will freeze for at least 10 minutes, when opening, saving or auto saving.  Unless the queue is cleared.  This is only a hassle at the moment because we can still quickly open the project on a Mac and clear the queue and re-save it.  But we are migrating to windows and will not have any Macs once completed so will be a major problem opening existing projects.

 

We've been trying to investigate work arounds, like writing an extend script to clear the queue, but this does seem like a bug in AE.

 

Is there a way to tell AE to quickly ignore asset paths and render queue paths and allow the artists to replace the assets with the new windows paths.  Because some artists are waiting 30 minutes before their AE project opens on windows.

 

Thanks

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1 reply

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
October 22, 2021

Could simply boil down to the program forever calculating caches. Otherwise it sounds like a slightly exotic bug that probably barely anyone noticed up to this point, given the unusual conditions. Could also well be that the conversion somehow collides with your server-side folder structure and simply consumes so much network I/O that it takes forever. Copying the projects locally or doing a Collect Files beforehand might therefore help as well.

 

Mylenium

S
silicontrip17362016Author
Known Participant
October 23, 2021

I'm not sure what the cause is, what we do know is that it only affects the windows version and that it is specifically to do with the render queue.

 

We've taken projects built on Windows to the Mac side, items in the render cache, assets pointing to drive letters.  The projects open without any unusual delays. 

 

This bug happens with every existing project (containing render queues) we've tried so far.  

We had tried re-installing After effects, removing the whole cloud suite and installing just after effects, we erased and reinstalled the OS from scratch.  Didn't connect it to a domain, used a 4G internet connection rather than the coporate LAN, we almost abandoned the migration and started looking into how we can directly address the Mac issues we are having.

 

We did packet captures, switch port graphs and even NAS utilisation and concluded that it wasn't network related. The CPU graph showed that the machine was just busy spinning its wheels, the application goes into "not responding" state.

 

We thought it might've been asset paths. So removed assets layer by layer and the problem still occured.  

 

Of course new projects didn't have the problem, just the existing ones.

 

It was only by luck that one of the animators just left the machine running after opening a project on a quiet day, and discovered that it would open after 10 minutes or so.   So we did further analysis and discovered that is was the render queue.  

 

It didn't matter if the jobs where ready, done, skipped or failed just the presence of an item caused Windows AE grief.

 

Once the AE starts responding, the render queue can be cleared from Windows.

Only if the queue isn't cleared the issue won't present itself unless it saves the project.

 

I'll try a collect files, but our research suggests that it has nothing to do with network asset paths, and it is just items in the render queue which have been put there by a Mac. 

 

Our current solutions so far are; 

  1. keep some Macs around to clear the queue first.
  2. if the job isn't urgent, wait the 30 minutes or so to open the project.

 

If anyone else has an idea that doesn't require the above 2 solutions please let us know.

(even just a script to remove elements from an AE project file directly) 

 

thanks

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