After Effects 2023 Run Amok: randomly replacing imported clips and stills

Thanks for trying out clearing the Media Cache @Darrell5E64, sorry to see it didn't resolve the issue.

Is this behavior only happening in this particular project? If so, perhaps try importing your current project into a new one. This will rebuild some of the metadata around the project items and may help resolve the items pointing to the wrong media.

Aside: the memory management in After Effects has been updated this year to be more true to the limits set in the preferences, but that has revealed other memory management issues that we're still working to squash, especially on M1 Macs where the RAM is shared with GPU. There are some improvements in the latest Beta builds that you may want to try out if you have time.

Thanks again,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

Good morning,

Thanks for getting back to me. Truly was hoping the cache clear was the problem!

I regularly clear out my media cache with Edit/‘purge’ pulldown out of necessity anyway just to get previews to render (this in and of itself seems more of an issue than it was a few years ago… I used to be able to have 5 Adobe apps open at once and still get AE to render previews with allotted and dedicated memory. Now I have to close all but 1 or maybe 2 other apps. And continually purge memory)

Anyway…. I did follow both recommended clears. Got very hopeful when ‘cleaning database’ as it took like 10 minutes and I thought the housekeeping surely must be finding and clearing a mess.

However when I reopened problem project file, things were still askew. File in project window below (1st screen) should be file previewed in finder in second screengrab.

I appreciate any help resolving this. I really got excited about AE2023 new track matte assign function (a game changer!!) and would love to stop having to deal with text malfunction of having to jump through hoops to select last character in text blocks (complete pain in the ass).

I know it’s not our server or the files, as I had to rebuild this project and it works fine in AE2022.

Hi @Darrell5E64

Thank you for reporting this issue and for your patience with our response. It looks like your media cache may have gotten corrupted, leading to the apparent switching of clips. If you open Preferences > Media & Disk Cache, then choose "Clean Database & Cache", does the issue go away?

The second issue seems unrelated, but has it persisted on your system?

Thanks again for reporting these issues and for any further information you can provide,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

Re-installed AE 2023. No fix either. Got an odd prompt when all I did was create a new comp:

and in that new empty comp, there are zero layers and yet I see a graphic image.

This graphic is in the project, used in an older comp. (it was also randomly added as a layer in my current working comp earlier, thought maybe it was an erroneous 'paste' command. was not)