After effect not saving

[grega67012557]

I have been using after effects all day and its been fine, saving was fine.

but now all of a sudden the application wont save, i go to file save, click on save and nothing happens.

same with save as, once i click the option the menu just disappears and nothing happens.

I have restarted my machine and switched between apps and nothing is working, i have even started a new after effects document and it will just not save.

[Megan5EDD]

Yeah I had been working in After Effects CC 2020 but I just switched over to CC 2019 and so far so good. 

2021 not off to a strong start!

[Maksim-Editor]

This worked! Thank you! If you are on Mac, you need to:

1. In After Effects, go to File>Export>Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue
2. Find the "Temporal files" folder, which can be accessed by typing the following on Mac's native Terminal app: 

   open $TMPDIR

3. This will open the "T" folder.  A tip is to see this folder in "list" mode, and then order the subfolders inside in order of "Date Modified". This will show at the top the most recent subfolder.
4. In my case I found a temporal folder created by Adobe Media Encoder called "Untitled Project_AME" which contained the After Effects project file which I couldn't save via After Effects. I just copied it into another folder and reopened that file. Voila!

[Francesco8]

I've just had the same problem and this's worked pretty well, thank you!

[Triple 9 Nickel]

This worked. You're a lifesaver!

Adobe really needs to autosave new projects that don't have a destination folder yet. 

[Leon5D23]

I had this same problem. Im not sure if this will work for anyone else but I realized my internet was bad so my Adobe Cloud software couldnt connect. Once it connected, I restarted AfterEffects and they let me save. If this is on purpose in the software, Adobe is BOGUS lolol If I just saved you hours of work follow me on IG at LeonOfDavinci

[ciprianmaxim]

Thanks! In my case, Media Encoder created the folder in the same location as the original project, so just copied/renamed it and done.

[kingofcute]

Thanks all, that worked for me! @ciprianmaxim Thank you for pointing this out as well. I spent ages looking for the the file in my Temporal folder but it was hiding in plain sight! 

[TLSM27]

THANK YOU for this work around. This worked for me but my temp project file was also saved in the original folder I was using.

[neseelcin]

Hello everyone, 

Today Unfortunately I lived same problem but you re really saved my all day. I just wanna thank all of you.

[madmatthies]

I just had this issue - though I lost all my work I did find a solution sort of now. After trying to save anything for over two hours the thing that worked for me in the end was updating my after effects and making sure my adobe cloud file syncing was working. It wasn't connected and once I refreshed the connection it let me save. Hopefully this can help someone out.

[aaronc54326086]

I had the same issue, and after i reboot my computer, cleared my media cache (it was 88.7GB), opened another project file to test "save as" and reopened my project file -- it worked.

I guessing it was the media cache.

[Beatrice Franco]

CHECK THIS SOLUTION , please!

Hello everyone!

I was having the same problems, all of you described so well, over the last 3 months. I had technical remote assistance from the Adobe people, a couple of times, read just about every discussion there is in this support community, and just when i was at the verge of buying a new computer, i found a solution.

The new AE 2021 - 2022, which is technically an update of the previous After Effects, on some systems, is read as a "new program"; I believe you need to give AE full disk access again after installing Adobe AE 2021, because the AE 2020 is seen as a different application so the settings and disk rights aren't transferred to the new app install (which is technically an update, but you get the picture).

To do this:
Go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Full Disk Access > *ensure your Adobe software are ticked*

CHANGED MY LIFE! My Best to you all!

[WOLFman]

Responding here so that my answer goes to the top.

I had the same issue, and I've spent the last couple of days trying everything from restarting my computer to purging my cache every five minutes.

Turns out all I had to do was update After Effects...

Silly mistake, and I'm kicking myself now - but I thought I'd share for anyone who, like me, didn't consider this 🙂

[TLSM27]

I'm glad this worked for you, but just wanted to update for Adobe records to note that CC says I'm all up to date but this issue is still happening to me.

[Nishanth TG]

Had the same issue, randomly just stopped saving and I used the media encoder way to save my file before quitting and reopening. Saving worked on restart and the only difference was that I tried to run FX console as a script to see if it was working (it hasn't been updated for AE 2022's latest update). It didn't run as a script either and when I tried running it again on a dummy file, saving didn't work. Might be a safety feature to not let us save when running suspicious scripts, might be adobe bugs. Hope this helps in case anyone had the same issue.

[defaultaluo06h321d3 · Accepted solution]

This happened to me. I'd open it and do a little thing and try and save and it would work, but then I would do a bunch of stuff and all File > things like save, import etc stopped working. Reset my computer etc etc and would start working again and same thing would happen. Redid the same thing 5 times. 

I fixed it by emptying my cache (which was full) 

😕