AE No longer relinks media........?

[rd72310852]

Hiya

Why oh Why do I have to *manually* relink my media everytime i spend more than afew days away from a project? I have constant error messages (2 x messages per missing media item, sometimes '00s per project) and have to hit return for *every single one of them* before i can even open my projects. (if i don't relink, the screen remains black instead of showing anything in the comps/project, no matter what)

Have tried a few searches here, but can't see anything similar, apologies if it's already been dealt with. 

Is there patch or something? I'/m using After Effects V 18.0.0 on an imac Pro, plenty of memory/RAM and Big Sur11.7

[Mylenium]

Without exact info about the media types, where they are stored, their naming, how they are used in the project and critical things like cache and hardware acceleration settings we can't really tell you much. You need to be more specific. Sounds more like a problem with the volume or something with the files themselves, not AE itself. There have e.g. been issues with special characters in file names in recent versions.

Mylenium 

[rd72310852]

Yes maybe volume, if this is not a common issue. Media types are standard: jpg, png, eps, psd, svg, mov etc. Nothing special. No special characters, nothing unusal in naming. Cache is on an external SSD, to 300gb. Everything else is local HD. 64Gig RAM, 36 for AE, no other applications open (except safari and slack).

Not sure where I can what hardware acceleration settings i have?

2 main error messager per asset:

[rd72310852]

actually there is often this error as well: with file name backwards.

[Byron Cortez]

And when you open them in Illustrator, the error does not appear and you can open them without any issue? Try using the File / Dependencies / Collect Files... option to put everything in one folder. It could be that some directory out there is loose.

[rd72310852]

It also happens with collected projects—it occurs after i don't touch a project for a few days (even if I've collected and reduced).  i dont' think it's the hyphens in the filenames either, as it happens with long and short filenames, with and wihtout hypens/underscores. I can't remember when it started, but suspect last year sometime, and i just put it in the 'deal with it later' pile. I had assumed it was common error, that perhaps after some time there'd be a patch to sort it out. No problems with any other program for source files (ai, psd, quicktime, etc.). I"ve been using Ae for maybe 20 years, and this is worst bug I've seen.... (if it is a bug?) I thought everyone else would be experiencing it too? 

[rd72310852]

In fact, yesterday I spent a few hours going through maybe 8 projects I'd been working on in November, and hadn't touched since. Hadn't moved the files, deleted or renamed anything, just left them untouched. Yesterday I had to go through each one and relink each file as if it were missing media.... 

[Byron Cortez]

With the .JPG I suggest you put a name without so much hyphen.

[Mylenium]

It would probably be useful to not just dump everything on the desktop and create a dedicated projects folder on the root level of your volume(s). The GEPJ thing is an inside gag by the developers.

Mylenium 

[rd72310852]

ok i'll start doing that, but is there a fix otherwise?

AE never used to do this.

[rd72310852 · Accepted solution]

ok, i have moved everything into the documents/... folder, off the desktop and ... voila! it seems to be ok.

early days, but projects i've opened so far haven't requested footage relinks.  Thanks for your help, so far so good!