Missing Media When Exporting in Media Encoder

[mikep13649087]

Hello, I'm trying to export a 3-minute video in After Effects. It's made up of animated text in nested comps, background videos, MotionBRO transitions, and music.

First, I tried to export the Lossless AVI directly from the Render Queue but the video would come out with several errors and audio popping in and out.

When I export the H.264 file in Media Encoder, it works perfectly except for one section where I have a couple of nested comps. (A cell phone animation and nested text). It shows up as bars and tone on the preview and in the exported video. In After Effects, however, the comps are visible and there is no missing media. What is going on and how do I fix this? 

Thank you!

[Siirvend]

Im having the same issue here. Odd thing is that Ive encoded it multiple times and each time a different clip will be missing and the previously missing ones are there once again. I have no idea what the issue is since nothing has changed and everything shows up in the After Effects preview.

[Siirvend]

EDIT: I got it to work fine after rendering a few times! The only change I made was going into the original working file in After Effects and finding the video clip in my imported media library. I right clicked and selected "reload" on each of the offending clips. Visually it changed nothing, but I rendered a final time and everything came out alright. Another thing of note is that I kept After Effects open while the media encoder app did its work, whereas before I closed it and loaded the composition in the encoder on its own.

Hope this helps! Im not sure if it actually did anything or I just got lucky but I figured Id let you and anyone else know!

[default5f71xum47r2m]

Having exatlcy same issue... reloading footage didnt help. for me even static pictures are missing from exported video...

[Szalam]

Try exporting out of AE's render queue into QuickTime with the Prores codec (422 is fine). Then, take that file and put it in Adobe Media Encoder to make your MP4.

" I tried to export the Lossless AVI directly from the Render Queue but the video would come out with several errors and audio popping in and out."

The reason the AVI you made had "audio popping in and out" is probably because uncompressed AVIs have such a high data rate that your hard drive can't even deliver it fast enough to play back. You could put it into Adobe Media Encoder to make an MP4 and it'd probably be fine too. I always just suggest ProRes as the intermediate codec because it's much smaller file sizes than uncompressed AVI, but it's still visually lossless (high quality).

[brodyw91135619]

This work around was effective for me, but I still would like to know a true solve for this problem. I've worked on a couple projects and this issue is continuing to happen.

[jeromem77766442]

I was having the same issues, I tried reloading all of the footage but it didn't work. I then restarted AE - and it worked! 

[Penelope6C14]

Thank you so much for this suggestion. Worked for me as I was going nuts!

[casual_Serenade5CFA]

This is the magic trick! Worked for me. Thanks pal!

[cloudofdestiny]

i know its 2 years old but i love you i was about to go insane thank you sm

[neptuneb]

not sure if this will help but i was having the same problem and found out that the photos/media in my project that weren't working were ones i imported from my photos app [im on mac] and not my files eg. downloads etc. once i replaced them they rendered just fine :))

[Mark Haldane]

There was an update a few months ago now that seemed to cause this for me, and it has been happening ever since. I still haven't found a decently solution (or reason why it's even happening.)

[Gfontain89]

having this same issue right now. Media Encoder is basically unsable.

[Gfontain89]

I'm using Premiere however.

[Mark Haldane]

I don't know about Premier but with After Effects I find it helps close AE, re-open the project and then export. Don't know if this works every time but it has at least twice that I can remember.

[thorjekes]

I experience the same issue. Restarting and reloading the footage didn't work for me.
I moved my videofile from 'downloads' and added it to a local folder. 

[whalien04]

I had the same issue and i'm a bit frustrated that this is the only thread i can find that talks about this issue, and we're not even really sure what's going on. 

1. my first fix was similar to one answer here which was i rendered to mov via ae then converted to mp4 on media encoder. But this eats up alot of my pc's memory esp am only doing this on a laptop. 

2. Reloading the file, restarting ae, and trying multiple times didn't work for me, but what did was i moved the supposedly missing video to the same folder where my ae file is. 

[lgh27485006f4k4]

Move the missing video to the same folder with the AE file work! Thank you!

[Velz Design]

I'm also having this issue. Or had this issue! I don't have a way to fix it yet but at least I found the problem and how to work around it so I can continue rendering with AME. I don't know if my situation is the same as others but here is what I experienced.

I noticed that this "missing file" render problem occurred when I tried to render a comp from an AE file that was saved locally (on desktop) using footage that was also saved in the same folder. When I tried to render from an AE file (+ footage) that was saved on an online server (like OneDrive or Dropbox) everything worked as usual.

I moved the AE project (AE file + footage) from which I wanted to render from desktop to OneDrive and tried to render it. Thankfully it worked! So I assume my AME is only searching for footage in my online storage servers and not in de local folders. To which my only question is: Why? 😅

It also explains why AE could see my footage (because it was there, on my desktop), but AME couldn't render the footage because it was saved locally and not on an online server. If this really is the issue I hope I can change it in AME.

[Seth Freethink]

This bug is driving me completely crazy.

I have a somewhat complex project to create a 35-second monoscopic VR video.

The comp I’m trying to send to Media Encoder is 12288 x 6144, and I’m trying to render out an 8192 x 4096 HEVC file via Media Encoder as per this tutorial.

The four source files that go offline are 10-bit 8632 x 4856 DNxHR HQX in a MXF OP1a container.

Inside After Effects, the media plays fine via RAM preview.

I’ve tried absolutely everything on this thread, as well as these supposed workarounds from Adobe.

I’m noticing this bug with:

• After Effects 24.3.0.50
• Media Encoder 24.3.0
• Windows 11 Pro for Workstations
• 23H2
• 22631.3527
• Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6136 CPU @ 3.00GHz   2.99 GHz
• 48.0 GB (46.7 GB usable)
• GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
• NVIDIA Studio Driver 552.22

But I was worried that that local hardware wasn’t good enough, so I also tried going to AWS EC2:

• g5.16xlarge on AWS EC2
• Edition Windows Server 2022 Datacenter
• Version 21H2
• Installed on ‎5/‎9/‎2024
• OS build 20348.2402
• AMD EPYC 7R32   2.80 GHz
• 256 GB (253 GB usable)
• Media on a gp3 cache drive with 1,000 MB/s throughput and 16,000 IOPS
• NVIDIA A10G
• NVIDIA Driver 551.78

On EC2, I only was using a G5 because it seems that the effect I’m using “requires 3D acceleration,” even though I know that After Effects is still mostly working on CPU. I would have attached an Elastic Graphics accelerator to a compute-optimized instance, but it appears that Elastic Graphics was deprecated this year.

The issue also occurs when I try to pull in the comp to Premiere via Dynamic Link.

Seems like the only think I can do is suffer through and export an intermediate ProRes file. After Effects’ Render Queue that requires CUDA seems much, much slower than using “Software Only” in Media Encoder.

Would appreciate some acknowledgement from Adobe on this catastrophic bug.

[Thom Dull]

Similar or maybe even the same thing. When i export video from AE it does not recognize it in ME. It recognizes graphics but not video that is in the same composition. I called a couple of colleagues and they have the same problem, they are all working around it. 

[Thom Dull]