AE Project Will Not Open

[jefft40236083]

Hello.  I am running AE CC 2017 on Windows 10 / i7 processor with 128 GB of RAM. 

I chose not to upgrade to 2018 just yet after seeing the way font selection works (I emailed Adobe about it).  Anyway - yesterday I was working on a project and AE froze.  I couldn't get windows to stop the AE process, so I ended up hard resetting my machine.  After a few re-starts and mandatory windows updates, I got my computer booted back up.  I opened CC 2017, open my project file, and I get the AE warning:  Unable to import file "<filename>" as project (bad format or not readable).  OK.  So, I went to my auto save folder and each of the 9 auto saves that I have for this project show me the same error message. 

Hmmmm .... so - I went to AE CC 2018 and tried to open the project and I got the same message.  I started a new project in both versions and tried to import each of the 10 "aep" files and I get the same message.  I can open up other "aep" files in After Effects, just not this one.  I'm at a loss as to why this is happening for this project.  There must have been some sort of corruption from the start.  From the time I started the project, I never closed it out, so I never had to open it until today.  Any suggestions I can get will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[Roei Tzoref]

Seems you tried most of the workarounds. I would try to rename the source footage folder in your project to force Ae to break the links to the footage item and have them as missing files.

Next time, other than auto save, you should also increment and save - It's so useful that it has a shortcut. I can have 50 versions in my Aep folder, even reaching to 100 versions. My decision to frequently increment and save Depends on how heavy the project file is (usually it's light)

[Mylenium]

Start by flushing any cached data and enabling capslock when opening/ importing the project to prevent render functions from kicking in.

Mylenium

[jefft40236083]

Thanks for the responses.  I deleted the cache files and turned on Caps when opening / importing the file and no change.  I feel like something got corrupted somehow at the folder level.  My rendered files within that folder aren't playing in VLC or anywhere.  I'm going to restore my machine to a time before the computer froze.

[jefft40236083]

I'm not sure what has happened.  All of the renders that I created that are in that project folder will not play with any video player (VLC, Media Player Classic, QuickTime, Windows Media Player).  I had sent a render of my project over the network to another computer and that one will play after copying it back to my machine.  I have tried to rename the "aep" file, the folder that everything is in, each asset that I used and nothing.  It sounds like it probably has something to do with windows freezing and corrupting the contents inside of the project folder somehow.  I wish there was a way to look at the file and fix anything that might be making it hang up.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Jeff,

I had a similar issue which turned out to be failure of a drive in my storage setup, which corrupted a good number of files before I detected it. Could this be the source of your issues too? Let us know if all is well or not.

Thanks,
Kevin

[jefft40236083 · Accepted solution]

Kevin - I am thinking it was a computer issue, but it's only isolated to this project folder.  Everything else on this drive opens fine, but something made this project corrupt and lost forever.  Luckily - I was pretty much done with the project, so it wasn't the worst that could have happened.  I was going to go in and tweak a few things, but it's ok.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Thanks for reporting back, Jeff.

Regards,
Kevin

[lucian5CED]

so there is no solution to fixing this