Non-updating of AE comp is back, yet AGAIN!

[hellopaul4]

OH WHEN WILL I EVER LEARN that linked AE/PPRo comps are NOT A THING unless you want to kill yourself.

Of course, because it's Friday afternoon and I have a deadline to meet, AE is just flat-out refusing to update ANYTHING in any of my comps. The same stupid bug that's been around for years.

I'm on AE Beta 26.0.0x47.

Adobe won't read this, Adobe won't act on this....they never do. I have lost count of how many times I've reported this bug - I know detail is missing today, but please look back through my NUMEROUS other reports of the same thing (a search CTI not updating should do it) for all the same old same old...

ugh.

[real_5081]

An existing bug that Adobe has refused to fix for years? I'm so shocked /s

[jenkmeister]

Well Adobe is reading it. The team tries to read all the forum posts. I am sorry you don't feel you are getting the support you need. 

For today, it doesn't sound like this problem is related to the past CTI not updating but it is hard to tell without details. 

Can you share a set of projects that aren't working? Can you share a video of what is happeneing? 

[real_5081]

Reading it isn't quite enough though is it. 

[JohnColombo]

@real_5081 Please keep all comments respectful and in line with our Community Guidelines. We’re here to help and for constructive conversations.

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[real_5081]

What specific term of the community guidelines did my comment violate? 

[hellopaul4]

Glad to hear Adobe IS reading this!

The tricky bit is that the problem does not apply to specific projects - the routine seems to be:

• Start working on a PPro project.
• Add some dynamically linked AE comps to the timeline.
• Keep working on the project happily for a few days, adding more DL AE comps. The project in question had, I'd guess, about 30 comps over the ~7 minute edit. Everything was kinda standard; 1920x1080 25fps timeline with 1920x1080 25fps comps dropped in; each comp was pretty basic - maybe 8 layers at most, almost no effects (probably no 3rd party plugins used) - mainly med. res. JPEGs or maybe basic AI files fading on, gradually scaling, fading off; each comp was maybe 8 secs long.
• After about 4 days of working on the project (with a complete shutdown of my PC at the end of each day), I'd start getting the issue: in AE, I'd hit the spacebar to initiate playback, and...nothing. Ah - I remember this - need to SCRUB the CTI to get it to update...maybe then, I can do a spacebar-playback - ah yes! Playback! But the CTI does not move, so it's a real pain to judge timings.
• Quitting AE and relaunching it fixes the problem most of the time.
• Then maybe a day later, the real annoyance starts - the comp viewer remains completely blank - the same dark grey as the surrounding background. And no, I'm not zoomed in on some random area. In fact zooming in and out also achieves nothing at all. At this point, I found a relaunch of AE did not fix the problem; a restart of my PC (sadly I'm now on Windoze 11, Officially The Worst OS in the World) did the trick.

I've never encountered these issues if I'm NOT using DL with PPro.

As I mentioned, I've gone into a lot of detail in my previous bug reports going back several years...not sure if you (Adobe) can look those up easily.

Update...here they are (going back to 2021):

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-bugs/the-same-old-non-moving-cti-and-worse-is-back...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/pti-and-cti-not-moving-on-preview/m-p/12337...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/pti-red-current-time-indicator-is-not-movin...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/pti-and-cti-not-moving-on-preview/m-p/12337...

[Paul Uu]

Thanks for the helpful details.

The curious thing here is that playback system has been completely rearchitected in the past few years (with playback from disk now). The functional experience you're having is clearly similar though, so I think we need to focus on other culprits.

First off, we need to fully understand your workflow here (as it's often subtle aspects of such things that make the difference between us being able to understand, reproduce, and then resolve issues like this, or hitting a brick wall with them).

As I read it, you're:

1. Starting a PPro Project and adding Dynamic Linked AE Comps to a Sequence, building that out.
2. But as you proceed, you're switching back and forth between AE and PPro, updating the Comps in AE.
3. At some point (as the PPro Project grows), AE will no longer successfully preview?
4. Successful previewing can be restored (at least temporarily) by simply restarting AE (while leaving PPro running)?
5. Eventually, the entire system must be restarted to restore successful previewing in AE?

If this is correct, here are a few thoughts for isolating the issue:
1. First off, does this preview failure in AE ever occur outside of this Dynamic Link context? Have you ever hit it, just working in AE (subsequent to a reboot of your PC), without PPro ever having been launch (or DL having been used)?
2. At the step 3 I list above, what happens if you quit AE and quit PPro, and then restart just AE and continue working in the Project where previewing just failed? Does the preview failure still happen?
3. When AE is failing to preview, does that AE comp that won't preview render correctly in PPro? If you make a change to the comp in AE and save, does that successfuly update and render in PPro across DL — even though that comp won't preview in AE?

All these details might help us isolate where the issue is occuring.

The other pieces that might help us would be to gather some logfiles from AE and the DynamicLink manager app from a session where the rendering failure occurs.

1. For AE as you start each day's session (from your daily reboot), go to Help: Enable Logging (this will require an application reboot, and the logging state only stays enabled for 24 hours).
2. When the error state occurs, go to Help: Reveal Logging File. This will actually reveal multiple folders of logging files, but but the ones you are looking for are After Effects Log.txt and After Effects Log-Last.txt (if more than one logging session has occurred.

For DynamicLink Manager:
1. Create an empty "dynamiclinkmanager Log.txt" file.
2. Place it here:  C:\Users\{User}\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\dynamiclinkmanager\25.0\logs
3. After quitting a session in which the AE preview will not update, grab the log files created there.

You can paste the text these log files here, or DM me to set up a file transfer.

And one final diagnostic step would be to get AE into the bug state and then use Task Manager to take a process sample. That resultant file could be quite useful, but will definitely require a shared folder to transfer.

I hope this gets things moving forward to solving this longstanding issue.

Paul