Why is Videopilot's Action Essentials not working with AE CC 15.1.0?

[lluvaas]

I wonder if other people are having this same issue and I wanted to post it here.

I've been using Video Copilot's Action Essentials plugins with some of my projects for about a year. Recently I upgraded to AE 15.1.0. The movie files are not coming into my project properly keyed, but rather they are either in a box, or are multicolored, i.e. Atmospheres are not transparent grays, for example, but are solid yellows with red outlines and other strange tones.

I uninstalled this newest version of AE, going back to version 15 and everything works as it should.

I've contacted videocopilot.net support and they don't have this issue at all with their files, or other customers.

I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this issue?

Since this plugin works fine using the previous version of After Effects I know that my specs are not the issue, but I'm putting them here anyway.

I am running macOS High Sierra, Version 10.13.4, iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015, Processor: 4 GHz Intel Core i7, Memory 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

Graphics Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB, 2.53 T internal drive and external drives.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

AE 15.1, the April2018 update, followed Apple's course of action to discontinue support for 32-bit, legacy CODECs in QuickTime. You'll have to use an older version of AME or AE to re-encode QTs encoded with these legacy CODECs.

More info here - Dropped support for Quicktime 7 era formats and codecs

[lluvaas]

Yes, but I tried Action Essentials in the latest version of Apple's Motion software and the effects/movies came into the project just fine. So, I'm not sure about all this. I guess one issue for me is keeping up with updates. I'm happy to stay with 15.0 which works fine as I said previously with video copilot's plugins, but that means I can't upgrade. You would think that video copilot.com would want to fix this issue.

[Snotneus2000]

I have the exact same problem, I also went back to AE 15.0.1. When i open one of the files it says it's a PNG stream, PNG is supported... Unless AE is interpreting the file in a wrong way. Anyways, this is a really stupid problem and I don't get why Adobe isn't more clear about this. This should be in the release notes in bold letters.

[lluvaas]

I don't see a way other than calling to let Adobe know about this issue. I'm dealing with .mov files from Action Essentials, not png files.

[Andrew Yoole]

The Quicktime files in Action Essentials use the Quicktime PNG codec.

Adobe's list of supported media in the current release suggests that Quicktime PNG should work, but there have been numerous problems with numerous codecs since the release, including ProRes files for some users.

Perhaps someone from inside Adobe can offer a more informed explanation if they read this.

[lluvaas]

Thank you for this explanation. I think that video copilot.net needs to know this as well. I have been communicating with them and they said I was the only one who complained about this issue.

[Snotneus2000]

This is definitely a bug then, I can reproduce the exact same thing. It's 15.1.0 that has broken the PNG in quicktime container interpretation. i say interpretation because my mac can read them just fine (preview and quicktime player and VLC as well) so it's definitely something in AE 15.1.0

[lluvaas]

Yes, I think it's a bug too. So, what's the next step? I've alerted video copilot.net, but I'm not getting anywhere with them. I sent them a file with examples of their Action Essentials not keying properly and been back and forth with them. Interesting that their mov files open fine in Motion, but not fine in AE. So I went back to 15.0 and the plugin works fine. But I can't find where to send a Bug Report to AE. They have a page, but they don't list After Effects.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

If you can reproduce an issue then it's definitely an occasion to file a Bug Report - the sooner, the better. Keep the offending file(s) handy in case you need to send them over. And if an issue appears but isn't reproducible BUTT happens too often for your comfort zone, then that too is an occasion to file a Bug Report. On such seemingly random issues for a single user, a pattern may appear when data is looked at, over a larger pool of users.

[Dave Merchant]

There are big problems with PNG files that have alpha channels in the latest releases of AE/Premiere. Until Adobe fixes it the best advice is to roll back to the previous versions of CC.

If you had one or two PNGs, converting them to TIFF or PSD will get around the bugs - but with tens of thousands of frame sequence files it's unrealistic to ask customers to convert everything.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Action Essentials has a very small number of PNG stills - 20, I believe.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

In AE, go to the Help Menu and select Send Feedback.