We use ProMAX as our media server and have run into an issue that their support people say "points to Adobe AE having issues with SMB shares" because other AE users have reported the issue that don't use ProMAX... but I can't find anyone else having the issue (at least in my cursory searching).
What's happening is we will get an error when trying to save an After Effects project we are working on. It says it can't overwrite the file. When you look for the file in either Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, it's gone. You can "save as" and give it a new name, but you can't save the project with the original file name.
Turns out, that's because the original file DOES exist. If I go onto the actual server and look for it, it's there. It's only on computers connected via the ProMAX software that lose the file. All folders are still intact. All other files are fine. It is only the .aep. And not all AE project files, either. Others in the same folder will be fine.
That's entirely up to them, I suppose. Could be anything from weird namespace and caching issues to simple delays and timeouts. No idea. Never used it. Definitely not a case of "AE doesn't liek SMB shares" in the most generic sense. For many people it works just fine and from personal experience I can only say that we never had issues on multiple SMB platforms (Irix, Linux, Mac, Windows all in different versions). So there you have it. It's all in the details. That being the case, you may get better answers on ProMAX-centric communities or even via their official support.
Unfortunately, I'm here because that's the response I got from the offical ProMAX support.
It doesn't seem to be anything naming related because it happens kind of randomly, not just which file is affected, but if/when that file is affected. It seems like if it were naming related, it would be more consistent.
I'll have my IT department escalate and see if they can't pin it down between ProMAX and Adobe's actual support teams.
What are the specs for the storage? How is it connected? Do they offer any settings for write caches or delayed writing? Does it uses any internal RAIDing or other safety and backup mechnismas like basig hashing and buffering? If it's that random it seems to me it would be more of a performance issue in the device itself like it not keeping the connections open long enough or calculating wrong file structures. Not sure how AE plays into this, as it seems to me you're saying that it worked reliably once.
It is a RAID array. It's built specifically to be a media server. We're connected via gigabit ethernet. And it's not that it worked reliably once, it works reliably most of the time. We have dozens of AE projects this has never happened to. And it's never happened for any other file types that we can think of. We use .prproj, .ai, .psd, .png, .jpg, .mp4, .r3d, .mov, .mxf, .wav, .sesx... all the typical files you would need in a video post production workflow. AE projects are the only ones we can think of this happening to.
I imagine posting again is frowned upon, so I'll see if commenting puts this back on the radar. This is an ongoing issue. My editor lost three AEP projects today alone. Again, they aren't truly gone.
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