Using Character Animator with After Effects

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
March 21, 2017
3 replies
1390 views

I currently working on an After Effects project which uses multiple scenes created in Character Animator. The project works well when it is being used on a Mac, which is the computer it was created on. I have to try to transfer it to a PC in order to export and edit the project further but whenever I do I cannot Link the Character Animator project to it. I keep getting the error "After Effects error: Failed to connect to Adobe Dynamic Link project. ( 86 :: 1 )" When I try to replace or re-load the file I am unable to get it to work.

Is there any way to transfer the project itself with all of the links intact from a Mac to a PC or does the project essentially have to be re-done when transfering between operating systems?

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oksamurai

Legend

From the team: "The project itself should be cross platform and I'd think dynamic links would be as well, but you might have to relink footage due to automatic pathing logic not correctly finding the items in the new locations."

Are all the appropriate files relinked in both CH and AE? Sounds like it should theoretically work, and if you're seeing that message it's possible that AE isn't able to find everything it needs...

J

jakubponAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the reply. The AE project does open and the only part missing is the Character Animator parts. The Character Animator file also opens by itself and has all assets present.

When I try to fix the link between AE and Character Animator I try the re-load option while selecting one of the missing assets and it says no file found since it was moved. Then I try to replace the file and the "After Effects error: Failed to connect to Adobe Dynamic Link project. ( 86 :: 1 )" error comes up. Same thing happens when I double click the icon that means the file is missing.

Is there a different way I should be re-linking the CH and AE files? Is there anything else I should try to do?

oksamurai

Legend

No, it sounds like you're doing it right. Hmmm.

Since it's working on the Mac and not the PC, my best guess is this: CH makes really huge projects. That CH Data folder in particular is big, with thousands of files that deal with your puppets and recordings. Sometimes things get lost in translation when everything gets moved - we've seen this a ton particularly with stuff like Dropbox and other cloud-based solutions, but I've seen it happen with external hard drives as well. We'll hopefully make this better in the future - right now we've got the easily exported .puppet files, maybe we'll be able to do the same for scenes in the future. So maybe something isn't coming over correctly.

We'll take a closer look at it, but for now I think your best bet may be to export as a PNG + WAV from CH on the Mac, and then send those to the the PC, and then do File > Scripts > New Comps From CH Recording.jsx in AE - basically doing a baked in version with transparency instead of dynamic link.

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