Lost All Puppets and Scenes in Project

[Drew44331263]

Hi, I just finished archiving a project in AE that had dynamic links from Character Animator. When I dragged my CH project, CH media, and CH data into the archive folder it wiped everything from the CH project. I have no puppets or scenes at all.

Has anyone else had this issue?

[El Wombat]

No. Sorry to hear about that…

[oksamurai]

Ugh sorry. By archive folder, do you mean a backup folder somewhere like on a cloud service or external hard drive or something? Or putting everything into a zip file?

There's no good reason I can think of why everything would disappear - I've never heard of that before. CH projects do have a huge number of files associated with them (can be tens of thousands), but I can't think of anything specific that would make them get deleted.

[Drew44331263]

I created a folder to upload to our server. I dragged the CH project and CH data folder to the official Archive folder. When I opened up my project, it was completely empty of all puppets and scenes. In AE it says, "AE failed to connect to Adobe Dynamic Link project ( 8 :: 1)."I still have all of those tens of thousands of files.

[oksamurai]

Was there also a "CH Media" folder created alongside CH Data? For example, my projects look like:

CH Media should hold all your PSD/AI and recording files. Similar to After Effects, you have to gather these referenced files if they're spread out around your desktop (File > Copy Media Files Into Project Folder inside CH).

[Drew44331263]

When I select, File > Copy Media Into Project Folder, it says, "No files outside the project folder."

[Dan Ramirez]

Yep, from your screenshot, I see that you don't have anything in your project panel. Somehow, that chproj got moved away from your project folder. If you still have your original project folder, everything should work just fine.

We could explore a way to combine everything together into one file so the *file* not the *folder* would contain your project. It would still need to be able to reference external files. This solution would help your situation, but it could also be confusing if some of the footage files are in the project file and others are externally referenced.

-Dan R.

CH QA

[Drew44331263]

How do we go about doing that?

[oksamurai]

Your .chproj file and Ch Media & Data folders should all be in one folder. If that (original) folder was still around, I think it would work. Still, if you double-clicked that .chproj I would expect some stuff to show up in the project panel, which you might have to relink to the new media, it should look for those 2 folders next to it - so it's strange to me that nothing is showing up. Does WIndow > History show you anything?

[tralawar]

I had this happen switching over to the Rig Screen. When the computer has many things running, or when working with high resolution animation files, the program can lag. Then the history tab is placed where one may expect to click. I happen to click an old revision and then some rigging changes were made before the lag was processed. When the program is in this state it can be hard to tell if you are even making changes especially when switching  back and forth from record to rig. For me I hit an old revision and by the time I realized what was happening there was no going back. I lost a good amount of progress. The original puppet files are intact by I lost a lot of progress. I expect the rigging layer to be where history is... and history becomes to easy to click. I guess 'Saving New Version' Often is encouraged but not easy to remember or keep a sensible pattern for me. I should probably treat them like git commits, or just hide the history panel all together..

[Dan Ramirez]

For archiving, I like to zip the entire Character Animator Project folder, but if you're still working on it, you can move it around, but you have to move the entire folder. If you move parts of it, when opened, it will look for files in its new location and it won't find them.

[Drew44331263]

That's what I should do in the future. Thanks!

[HouHouHou]

Before I archive my 1st project in Adobe apps, I want to check my process.

Let's say I have a main video project folder named VID PROJECT and inside it I keep the associated and dynamically linked Ch, Ae and Pr projects in their own separate folders. Can I safely gather/collect all the files in each app (Ch does this automatically), zip the main VID PROJECT folder, and move it all to an archive disk and expect the dynamic links to remain or auto-re-link if I later move the VID PROJECT back to my computer and reopen the projects?

Thanks!

[TheOriginalGC]

In the File tab is a prompt: "Copy Media Files Into Project Folder." Be sure to click on that to make sure that all of the dynamically linked files are part of your project.

[HouHouHou]

Ah, yes, thank you.

tk