Phantom Assets Showing Up

Report · May 23, 2023

On MacOS 13.3.1 and After Effects 23, I'm experiencing the weirdest issue: A still image from my footage (with all of its various effects intact, including keying, color-correction, and shadows) is appearing elsewhere in the project... including in precomposed layers that should be showing nothing at all.

I have no idea what steps I took to make this happen, and by similar virtue, I have no idea how to fix it. The phantom asset even shows up in exported frames, so the program clearly thinks that there's something there.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Report · May 23, 2023

For anyone else experiencing this issue, clearing the cache does fix it.

I'd still love to know how to avoid it in the future, though, and understand what caused it in the first place.