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

[PhantomLimb_Arber]

I need to send a client some collected projects, but the File > Dependencies > Collect Files command is not collecting some of the files (after the project has been reduced, so all the files in the project are required), including the project file!

I just end up with a collected folder containing a "Footage" folder that includes some of the files and not others. This is a nightmare!! There are hundreds of files that will take days I do not have to manually track each file down.

Any suggestions?

J

[Mylenium]

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

[Todd_Kopriva]

As Mylenium says, we need more information.

A screenshot of the Collect Files dialog box with your settings would be a good start, as we as the information requested here:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/961743

[PhantomLimb_Arber]

Apologies for the lack of info, as I was panic-mode trying to get files to a client. I sidestepped the issue by resaving files down to CS6 and collecting files from that app, which worked fine!

However, the issue still needs to be resolved, so here's some more information:

MAC

Mid-2010 Mac Pro

Processor  2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Memory  24 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC

Graphics  ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

Software  OS X 10.9.1 (13B42)

AFTER EFFECTS

Version 12.2.0.52

OVERVIEW

WIth project open, go File > Dependencies > Collect FIles... And then click "Collect..." on the box, choose a location and the click Save.

Sometimes I will get a dialogue box pop up warning me about missing files (even though there are none in the project, and the Collect box did not mention any missing files). Regardless of whether that warning pops up, the resulting folder does not include the project file or the report text file, onlt the Footage folder. And usually there are lots of missing files in the Footage folder.

Hope this info helps as this is very frustrating!!

[Mylenium]

Generate a report and provide it. This may reveal the issue. Also your folder hierarchy is pretty long and Collect Files ahs always had issues with such long paths. Moving the project and sources to a higher level might allow to collect it.

Mylenium

[PhantomLimb_Arber]

Report created:

          04/02/2014          22:56:00 GMT

Project name: Campaign Overview 2.aep

Source files collected: All

Collected comps: 

          ROUND PERCENTAGE

          SCATTERGRAPH

          Round dot

          GRAPH

          ROUND PERCENTAGE 2

          ROUND PERCENTAGE 3

          BAR PAIR

          Numbers

          Numbers 2

          Forex-Abstract-01-CS5

          Forex-Volume-CS5

          Forex-Abstract-03-CS5

          Blue Yellow Squares

          ROUND PERCENTAGE 4

          SCATTERGRAPH 2

          Forex-Abstract-New1

          Forex-Abstract-New2

          Abstract New Bars

          Forex-Abstract-New3

          Campaign Overview 30sec 01

          Campaign Overview 30sec Draft v1

          Campaign Overview 30sec 02

          Campaign Overview 30sec Draft v2

          01 - Opening Titles 2

          Campaign Overview 30sec 04

          GRAIN

          30 sec Text 1

          30 sec Text 2

          30 sec Text 3

          30 sec Text 4

          30 sec Text 5

          30 sec Text 6

          30 sec Text 7

          30 sec Text 8

          Campaign Overview 60sec Draft v1a

          Campaign Overview 60sec 01

          60 sec Text 3

          60 sec Text 4

          01 - Opening Titles 3

          60 sec Text 5

          60 sec Text 9

          60 sec text 10

          60 sec text 11

          Forex-BasicGraph

          Sliding Chart 1

          Sliding Chart 2

          Campaign Overview 60sec 02

          60 sec Text 12

          Campaign Overview 60sec 03

          Campaign Overview 60sec 04

          60 sec Text NEW 11a

          60 sec Text 6

          Campaign Overview 30sec 02 alt

          Campaign Overview 60sec 04 - Alt

          60 sec Text NEW 1a

          60 sec Text NEW 1b

          60 sec Text NEW 1c

          60 sec - Where football meets trading - 3 sec white

          60 sec - Where football meets trading - 3 sec white Alt

          60 sec - Where football meets trading - 6 sec white

          60 sec - Where football meets trading - 3 sec blue

          60 sec - Where football meets trading - 3 sec blue Alt

          60 sec - Where football meets trading - 6 sec white

          30 sec NEW 4a

          30 sec NEW 4b

          30 sec NEW 4c

          30 sec NEW 4a 2

          30 sec NEW 4b 2

          30 sec NEW 4c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 5a

          60 sec Text NEW 5b

          60 sec Text NEW 5c

          60 sec Text NEW 5a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 5b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 5c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 6a

          60 sec Text NEW 6b

          60 sec Text NEW 6c

          60 sec Text NEW 6a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 6b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 6c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 7a

          60 sec Text NEW 7c

          60 sec Text NEW 7b

          60 sec Text NEW 7a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 7b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 7c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 8a

          60 sec Text NEW 8b

          60 sec Text NEW 8c

          60 sec Text NEW 8a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 8b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 8c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 9a

          60 sec Text NEW 9b

          60 sec Text NEW 9c

          60 sec Text NEW 9a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 9b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 9c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 10a

          60 sec Text NEW 10b

          60 sec Text NEW 10c

          60 sec Text NEW 10a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 10b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 10c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 11b

          60 sec Text NEW 11c

          60 sec Text NEW 11a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 11b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 11c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 12a

          60 sec Text NEW 12b

          60 sec Text NEW 12c

          60 sec Text NEW 12a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 12b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 12c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 13a

          60 sec Text NEW 13b

          60 sec Text NEW 13c

          60 sec Text NEW 13a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 13b 2

          60 sec Text NEW 13c 2

          60 sec Text NEW 14a

          60 sec Text NEW 14b

          60 sec Text NEW 14a 2

          60 sec Text NEW 14b 2

          60 sec LOGOS 01a

          60 sec LOGOS 01b

          60 sec LOGOS 01c

          60 sec LOGOS 01d

          60 sec LOGOS 01a 2

          60 sec LOGOS 01b 2

          60 sec LOGOS 01c 2

          60 sec LOGOS 01d 2

          LTT Text 01 - Prepare

          LTT Text 01 - Execute

          LTT Text 01 - Analyse

          LTT Text 01 - Vincent Trading Account Charity

          LTT Text 01 - What moves currency prices? FA

          LTT Text 01 - What moves currency prices? TA

          LTT Text 01 - Risk Management

          LTT Text 01 - Recap

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Insights from MCFC players

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Insights from MCFC players

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Play our stats game

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Play our stats game

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Discover your trader personality

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Discover your trader personality

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Learn to trade with Vincent Kompany

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Learn to trade with Vincent Kompany

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Help raise $50,000

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Help raise $50,000

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Follow Vincent’s trading

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Follow Vincent’s trading

          30 sec NEW 3 sec - Are you prepared for the challenge?

          30 sec NEW 6 sec - Are you prepared for the challenge?

          60 sec launching 13.02.14 - 3 sec white

          60 sec launching 13.02.14 - 3 sec blue white

          60 sec launching 13.02.14 - 3 sec white Alt

          60 sec launching 13.02.14 - 6 sec blue white alt

          60 sec launching 13.02.14 - 6 sec white

          60 sec launching 13.02.14 - 6 sec blue white

          60 sec mcfc.forex.com where football - 3 sec white

          60 sec mcfc.forex.com where football - 3 sec blue white

          60 sec mcfc.forex.com where football - 3 sec white Alt

          60 sec mcfc.forex.com where football - 3 sec blue white Alt

          60 sec mcfc.forex.com where football - 6 sec white

          60 sec mcfc.forex.com where football - 6 sec blue white

          Campaign Overview League Table

          FPOTW-JA

          Discipline

          Row 3 - Edit

          Middle horizonal

          Middle vertical

          lines white

          Table

          Copy

          Average

          Poly

          Overall Results

          PENT

          Poly 2

          PERCENTAGE

          60 sec launching 12.02.14 - 3 sec blue white

          60 sec launching 12.02.14 - 3 sec white

          60 sec launching 12.02.14 - 3 sec white Alt

          60 sec launching 12.02.14 - 6 sec blue white

          60 sec launching 12.02.14 - 6 sec blue white alt

          60 sec launching 12.02.14 - 6 sec white

          60 sec - are you prepared - 6 sec white

          60 sec - are you prepared - 3 sec white

          60 sec - are you prepared - 3 sec blue

          60 sec - are you prepared - 6 sec blue

          60 sec - LOGOS  - 6 sec White

Number of collected files:  18

Size of collected files:  252 MB

Collected source files:

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/Campaign Overview Films/Campaign Overview 30sec Draft v1.mov

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/Campaign Overview Films/Campaign Overview 60sec Draft v1a.mov

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/FOREX/Artwork/Forex-Abstract-New1.ai

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/FOREX/Artwork/Forex-Abstract-New2.ai

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/FOREX/Artwork/Forex-BasicGraph.ai

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/FOREX/Artwork/Percentage.ai

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/FPOTW-JA.psd

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/Logos 2/FOREX_LOGO_NO_TAG_RGB.EPS

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/Logos 2/ManCity Crest sky blue.eps

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/PENT.ai

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/PERCENTAGE.ai

          /Users/jasonarber/Desktop/SuitFacts.mov

          /Volumes/STORE N GO/JA/ARTWORK/Colour Swatches.psd

          /Volumes/STORE N GO/JA/ARTWORK/Forex-Abstract-01-CS5.ai

          /Volumes/STORE N GO/JA/ARTWORK/Forex-Abstract-03-CS5.ai

          /Volumes/STORE N GO/JA/ARTWORK/Forex-Volume-CS5.ai

          /Volumes/STORE N GO/JA/Movies/Files For Jason/Execute - Fitness ref Jason.mov

          /Volumes/Wyld Drive/MP3/AmpLive/Rainydayz Remixes/04 Weird Fishez.mp3

Rendering plug-ins:

          Classic 3D

Effects used:  13

Effect:  Audio Waveform

Effect:  Curves

Effect:  Fast Blur

Effect:  Fill

Effect:  Levels

Effect:  Mir

Effect:  Noise

Effect:  Numbers

          External dependencies: 

                    Font family: ‘Knockout’, Font style: ‘HTF48-Featherweight’

Effect:  Optical Flares

Effect:  Particular

Effect:  Radial Wipe

Effect:  Slider Control

Effect:  Tint

Layer:  Text Layer

          External dependencies: 

                    Font family: “Knockout”, Font style: “HTF48-Featherweight”

                    Font family: “Knockout”, Font style: “HTF68-FullFeatherwt”

                    Font family: “Knockout”, Font style: “HTF72-FullCruiserwt”

[jgmotion]

Is there an answer to this yet? I am having the exact same problem.

[Raw Melon]

Exact same issues in AE CS6 11.0.4. Worked fine in previous versions so can only assume it's yet another buggy update!

Found a fix that worked for me - select your render comps, reduce project (you don't have to do this but it helps to filter out the chaff when archiving), save, Collect File but use "For All Comps" instead of "All". Worked for me.

[Ben_Day]

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)

[regsquires]

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.

[Szalam]

Are there any punctuation characters (?!$) or special characters in your file names or comp names? I noticed that the original poster has some comp names with question marks in them and I'm wondering if that would throw it off.

[Raw Melon]

Nice thought Szalam, but no. I thought I found a way round it in my previous post but it didn't work on re-visiting yesterday.

The only way I could get it to work way to flick between All/For All Comps/For Selectrd Comps until one of them took the bait!

[TaoHunter]

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.

[Szalam]

TaoHunter wrote:

Same problem here.

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

Your issue is probably not the same. You are using CS5.5. Mavericks is not a supported OS for anything but CS6 and CC. I have seen a number of odd issues when trying to run CS5.5 on Mavericks. The fact that you're running at all is pretty good.

[jgmotion]

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

[jjroman1989]

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????

[Szalam]

jjroman1989 wrote:

SO Adobe whats the problem? how come you haven't been responding????

This is a user-to-user forum where people (including Adobe employees) participate in their spare time. This is not an official place to contact Adobe. If you are experiencing problems and need immediate assistance, please contact Adobe Technical Support.

[Dave Hell]

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):

1. Reduce Project selecting just the really needed compositions to get rid of what I don't need
2. Run the Project Cleaner script (http://aescripts.com/project-cleaner/) to get rid of redundancies and for a deep cleaning
3. Run the OrganizeProjectAssets script http://provideocoalition.com/dtorno/video/organize-project-assets-free-after-effects-scrip t - to simplify the folder structure
4. Manual double check to the file names
5. Collect Files

Hope this will help.

Edit: Be careful when reducing and cleaning projects with expressions

[syd_garon]

This problem has been killing me but I found a work around(maybe this is more like a tip). Put all of your assets into one folder in your AE project, select all of them, drag them to a new folder on your hard drive. Maybe this is common knowledge but I didn't know that AE let you drag files from your project window to the finder.

[Atomickplaygrounds]

That helped. Thanks!!

[Olle_Lindell__AMG]

This is quite clearly a CC 2014 bug. It's not because of path names or file names that are too long etc, because this all worked FINE in all versions up to CC 2014. It's annoying that a professional company like Adobe releases a completely un-necessary CC 2014 release, which completely defies the idea of the "cloud" where it is supposed to be a ONE version CC application that is updated forever. Instead, new instances of all your Adobe apps for CC 2014 are installed and you now have to deal with re-installing all your plug-ins, scripts, presets etc etc. DISGRACE Adobe. On top of this, they've not added any new really useful functions, but instead completely bugged up the "Collect files" function that has worked fine before. Take a hint and don't try to fix what is not broken Adobe.

Anyway, my solution for this problem: "Save as - Save a Copy as CC (12)", then collect your files using Adobe After Effects CC (not CC 2014). The only issue with this is that you obviously need CC installed with all the same plugins etc.

Hope that helps,

Cheers

[Szalam]

Olle Lindell, AMG wrote:

This is quite clearly a CC 2014 bug.

Except that this thread was started before CC 2014 was released.

Someone with version 12.2.0 had this problem. Your problem is likely different. I would suggest that you file a bug report so Adobe can be officially aware of your problem: Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

This is a user-to-user forum, so we can't count on it to let them know that there are issues.

[Olle_Lindell__AMG]

Good point, however, people that have posted since the release of CC 2014 might have the same problem as me, in which case saving for CC (v12) and collecting through there is the best temporary solution I've found.

I've now reported this to Adobe.

[TL Westgate]

I'm having an issue with cc2014 on a Mac at work. When I click on Collect Files nothing happens. I have to save as CC (12) and then open up the project in there and Collect Files works. Anyone else have this problem?

[G_W]

Im having the same issue. CC14, iMac 2014, Yosemite.