Reconnecting media results in After Effects not responding

Report · Sep 20, 2019

Had to move media from a shared dropbox folder back to the SAN. When I attempted to reconnect the 400+ files/elements the software becomes unresponsive except that I can move the windows around the screen. Activity Monitor shows that After Effects is "Not Responding." I've had the same result when trying to reconnect on 2 other workstations using After Effects 2019.

The media stored on Quantum StorNext SAN (Copied from Mac Mini Server hosting Dropbox). The media was deleted from the dropbox machine once moved to the SAN.

Edit 4 (Main Workstation aka Ol' Faithful)
Mac Pro 6,1 running macOS 10.12.6
Thunderlink to Quantum
After Effects 2019 (16.1.3) Hangs, waited an hour

After Effects 2018 (15.1.2) Crash after 5 seconds

Edit 1
iMac Pro 1,1 running macOS 10.13.6
After Effects 2019 (16.1.2) Hangs, waited an hour
Thunderlink to Quantum

Edit 2
iMac 18,3 running macOS 10.12.6
After Effects 2019 (16.1.1) Hangs, waited an hour
Thunderlink to Quantum

I then tried saving the project file to AFX 2018 (15.x) and attempted to reconnect the media on the SAN using After Effects 2018 (15.1.2) on Edit 4. This resulted in a crash/quit after about 5 seconds. This was the only After Effects 2018 downgrade test.

Next, I copied the media from the Quantum SAN to a local HFS+ USB-3 SSD attached to Edit 4. The results for both AFX 2018 (crash) and 2019 (hang) were the same. Then I removed all .DS_Store and other hidden files from the SSD, same behavior. I then removed all hyphens from folder names, again same behavior.

Finally, I saved the 2019 version of the project to a .aepx file, importing that into a fresh 2019 project on Edit 4, same as before.

I'm willing to send the project file to an associate at Adobe if that will help me troubleshoot this issue.

Report · Sep 20, 2019

Try opening the project file with all of the media missing and resaving it. The open that copy and attempt to relink.

Also, have you tried bringing the media into a new project? (While you want the reconenct to be working, this can help you verify that it's the project file that's the problem and not the media).

Have you tried putting everything back onto Dropbox? While this ceratinly isn't an ideal approach, if you can get that working as expected, you can use Collect Files (File > Dependancies > Collect Files...) to move your files to a local drive and then to the SAN (I would go local drive first).

Report · Sep 30, 2019

All is well, the issue is solved. I suspect that an .OBJ file was potentially preventing reconnecting. I manually imported the OBJ file and opt-replaced it's usage. Then everything else reconnected without issue. I've not performed any tests to verify this, it is only sepculation.