After Effects & Replacing Project Files into Personal Files

[joshuaf61479231]

Hello adobe community. 

I'm trying my best to keep my cool on this one. I am an experienced editor and I do VFX and video editing daily.

The problem is, I started to copy and paste my after effects projects onto my desktop and then start editing from my desktop instead of opening projects directly from my hard drive (it's safer this way to avoid any corruption on my hard drive). But when I am finished my with my project file, I will then copy and past the project back into my peronsal files onto my hardive. When I go to drag and drop my AE Project onto my hard drive a pop will ask me to "replace" the prioject file, and so I click replace so that it will update my project to the last one I was working on with the same name from my desktop.

Easy peezy right? NOT. Come to find out, its nottttt replacing my last project file. It just does not replace it. And I just check an older project I did, and the same thing happened and I lost my latest project for that project, thinking that I replaced it.

Something goes wrong when I'm replacing AE projects with newer ones I've worked on from my desktop copy. It does not replace the file and I do not know why. Thank GOD that I didn't delete my trash folder....because the last project this happened to was a project on my updated Logo. Which is one of the most important AE projects I have.

All I need is for the projects to actually be replaced....and it's not working. I'm not sure if this is an Apple issue and an Adobe issue. But please fix this, I almost had a hard attack. 

[joshuaf61479231]

Also, this is not the first time something fishy happened. From time to time, I'll return to an older project, and I know that I made some small fixes and theyre missing when I reurn to a project. I am constantly saving my projects ontop of having the autsave turned on. So I'm just really unsure why some things don't get replaced or saved. And I think this replacing of the files is part of the problem.

[Mylenium]

As far as your OS is concerned, it's just some file with data in it. You may be barking up the wrong tree when asking the AE devs to "fix" whatever you see. The only thing they have control over is anything happening from within AE and indeed there appear to be some data corruption issues lately under some conditions. The rest we can't know. Despite your long write up you have pretty much not provided a single bit of useful info like basic system info, types of drives used, contents of the projects and so on. Without that nobody can even make the crudest guess...

Mylenium

[joshuaf61479231]

No this reponse is perfect. I am using Seagate portable drive with 5TB of space, and MAC OS Montery

2.9 GHz Quad Core-Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3. I am using the updated After Effects for 2022. And the projects I'm attempting top replace are also 2021 - 2022 versions.

.

I did not list the contents of my projects because my projects can be extensive ranging from 3 compositions to over 20 compositions depending on the project. My logo project has over 20 compositions. However, the other project this happened to only has about 5 compositions.

And thats why I meantioned that this could be an issue with something else other than Adobe products. If that's the case, yes I am contacting the wrong people. 

And I'm not barking up the wrong tree because I'm not barking at all....I just wanted to give a run down on my work process in case that help understand what's causing the problem. I'm sorry if it came off more agressive than I intended.

[joshuaf61479231]

My laptop has 1TB of space as well. So I have plenty of space onmy desktop.

[joshuaf61479231]

Also, the compositions can range as well anywhere from 10-50 layers per composition.

[Rick Gerard]

I'm not sure what is causing the problem but I have a workflow suggestion for you. AEP files are usually very small. I almost never overwrite files, I save versions. I have specific naming conventions that I have used since I started in the motion picture industry. It was taught to me by a master editor and it is the naming system used for many years by most if not all of the major studios. It has saved me thousands of hours over my career because I can always go back to a previous version if my client or a director wants to see something again. Everything is arranged and named by project, scene, and shot and take. 

I'm also confused by your statement "I started to copy and paste my After Effects projects onto my desktop and then start editing from my desktop instead of opening projects directly from my hard drive (it's safer this way to avoid any corruption on my hard drive)."  Your desktop is on a hard drive and it is just as easy to corrupt as any other drive. I understand using a working directory and an archive directory on another drive, but unless you also move footage around, any file you copy and paste to another location will lose all links to all footage in the project. The only way to avoid that is to do a Save As from inside AE. Just copying and moving AEP files will always foul up projects that have any linked assets in the project.