Serious problems in After Effects 17.1 on Mac opening an older project

[Jonah Lee Walker]

OK, so I am on OS X 10.15.2 on an iMac Pro with 64GB of RAM, and a Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB. I have a project for a short film I have been working on which opens fine in After Effects 2019, 16.1.3, but the video is all messed up in 17.1. The footage is all ProRes 4444 3.6-4k at 23.98 as shot on an Ari Alexa. In 17.1 I either get black or purple or sometimes upside down. And mostly black in a sequence, though if I open the individual clips and try to play them back they sort of play back, but with the purple and flipping frames showing up, and don't work at all in the composition.

Here is a frame in 16.1.3 and two from 17.1 with most showing up as black.

16.1.317.117.1

And here is opening the clip by itself in after effects and hitting play. As you can see the playback is not right at all.

I have trashed my preferences and have uninstalled and reinstalled, but am still getting this issue with the footage in this project. And it has the same effect if I re-import the footage or try and relink. Everything works fine with the footage in Premiere and in DaVinci Resolve 16.

[nishu_kush]

Hi Jonah,

Thanks for reaching out. I see that you are having preview issues with After Effects.

It looks related to the GPU. Could you try Turning off the hardware acceleration and check if that helps?

Let us know.

Thanks,

Nishu

[Rick Gerard]

Those kinds of errors are typically decoding errors. GPU driver or version problems could easily cause the problem. So could a tiny bit of data corruption. It could even be caused by a background app interrupting the data stream. 

If resetting things and fixing driver problems or turning off GPU acceleration does not fix the problem, you will have to see if transcoding the footage to something like an image sequence will solve the problems in After Effects. 

[dremer1128]

I'm having a very similar problem. I'm importing a bunch of footage, received from the same source, and every now and then one file comes in black. These are prores444 files. Sometimes they appear upside down as well. After a little more digging, it seems as if the files will play if I hit spacebar or ram preview with 0, and then I guess they're stored in my ram, so I can view them just fine. I can add effects on top of these and it doesn't go back to being black, it works just fine. But if I move my timeline to a specific frame that hasn't been previewed already, it will be black. There is no problem with the same footage in AE2019.

I'm using After Effects2020, GTX1080ti, and I updated all the drivers and turned off hardware acceleration as suggested. and it didn't help.

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Nope, it is exactly the same with metal or software rendering.

And all this footage works perfectly in Davinci Resolve, After Effects 2019, Premiere Pro 2019 and Premiere Pro 2020, it is only After Effects 2020 where this is happening.

[Baximus_NL]

Same problem here! Seems a AFX 2020 bug. Please fix!

[nishu_kush]

Could you share the file with us so that we can try to replicate it at our end? Also, is it straight out of the camera/recorder or it has been transcoded?

Thanks,

Nishu

[Baximus_NL]

I’ll send you the shot tomorrow morning!
Straight from camera raw file,

Verstuurd vanaf mijn iPhone

[Baximus_NL]

Here the link:

https://wetransfer.com/downloads/a09e015c8380b439649420ecea2b46ab20200116150426/01495d9d1867fa6a3b51...

[Rick Gerard]

That is a strange file. It will not open in AE 17.0.1 but it will open in anything else. 

[Jonah Lee Walker]

OK so I think I have gotten closer to figuring this out. All the footage that I have for this Alexa footage that shows up in Premiere with the damn Amira LUT as a master on the clips. I am on a commercial job with Alexa footage and the Amira plug in on the footage, and when I brought that footage into After Effects 2020 I got the exact same issue. And this is on a totally different computer with totally different footage that the only thing the same is is that it is ALEXA footage and on the latest After Effects.

The only way I was able to get the Alexa footage to work without glitching in the latest AE, is to open the footage in Premiere, and then remove any Lumetri, and then got into the lumetri again and select a lut, and then go back and select none. This switches off the AMIRA lut, and then if I send it to AE through Dynamic link it plays back fine.

I am pretty sure the AMIRA LUT in After Effects 2020 is broken. And it was broken before, as why can't you remove it completely and not just turn it off (which doesn't seem to stop the problem in After Effects).

[Jonah Lee Walker]

OK so this is most certainly a bug in After Effects 2020, and not something wrong with any of my footage. First I also happened to me at work on ALEXA footage, and I just did another test and it is still my belied that this is a major issue with the AMIRA lut and After Effects 2020.

To test this I went to the Alexa web site and downloaded some sample footage. I downloaded the first clip, B001C001_180327_R1ZA.mov And first I imported it into Adobe Premiere 2020 14.0.4 (build 18) and the footage showed up and it had the unremovable AMIRA Lut attached to it. So then I imported the same footage into After Effects 2020 Version 17.0.5 (Build 16) and the exact same issue occurs. The footage flashes black, has flipped frames and sometimes blue frames, but no matter what it is completely unusable. The same footage works fine in Premiere Pro 2020 and even more telling is it works fine in After Effects 2019 (though displaying without the Amira LUT applied, just as I want it to be).

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Well I tested it with todays release, 17.0.6 and the problem is not fixed.

This is once again using the Alexa test footage and this is playing back in After Effects.

[Jonah Lee Walker]

OK so Adobe now has released Betas of their video apps from within the Creative Cloud app. I downloaded After Effects which is version 7.1.0 (Build 55) and there the problem is fixed. Both the footage from Arri, and the Alexa footage I have been working on works.