Thank you for taking the time to respond. Although I believe I have ruled out corruption with the AE files because they still open and function perfectly fine on their own. When I opened the Premiere project today, all the comps (each one an animated icon we use a lot through this series of projects, so there are about 600 of them) were online. However at one point some of them began going offline while in the middle of working. And my attempt to relink brought the same result as yesterday - Premiere freezing, me having to Force Quit, and getting the "Premiere Pro encountered a serious error" blurb. Since the projects themselves are fine, it seems it must indeed be a Dynamic Link issue. The agent I chatted with did bring this up at one point I believe -- the missing piece of the puzzle is what to do about it, which he never got to. And that brings about my main complaint with Adobe's support staff. While I did find it a bit rude for him to leave the session after I asked questions suggesting trying other things that were contrary to his opinion (or merely just asking his opinion of my idea to try this or that) what is much more egregious is that I spent more than 2 hours with him, most of that time spent watching him control my computer, to absolutely no avail. Bottom line, it's the lack of knowledge.
And, to give another example, sometimes that lack of knowledge leads to the user being blamed for something not working. About two weeks ago I chatted with support because changes made inside multicam sequences were not showing in the main timeline. In this case the change was the Camera 2 track having been turned off in a previous session and being turned back on to, naturally, restore Camera 2 as a multicam option. But despite the track being on when viewing the sequence in a timeline and the video enabled and visible onscreen, switching back to the main timeline, Camera 2 remained black in all clips sourced from that multicam. After more than a half hour with the agent, his ultimate conclusion was that it wasn't working because I hadn't used the "Create Multicam Sequence" option in the Project Panel but, rather, had loaded all 2-camera interview footage into a sequence, round-tripped that to PluralEyes 4 and back, and then nested sets of clips, then enabled those as multicam sequences. How it got to the point of me describing my workflow in detail I don't know, but once he heard PluralEyes he latched onto that and said that is was because I used a third party sync solution rather than the built-in one, and that since this was an issue was a third-party program, he wouldn't be able to help me. Of course anyone who uses Premiere regularly (and the people who built it) would know that it shouldn't matter how you got your clips into the sequence and lined up with one another, bottom line is if you have clips on multiple tracks in a sequence, make that sequence into a multicam, and then use that as a source, any changes you make in the sequence are reflected in all instances of it. If only support had a fraction of this knowledge.
I'm left wondering if this is because the subscription model has opened the suite up to less experienced, more casual users and that support is geared mainly toward helping hobbyists with only the most basic troubleshooting - a large number of agents with minimal knowledge making up the frontline of the support army, which works out fine for folks with simple issues, but us professionals need to muscle through this barrier, waste hours in chats with people who know very little and essentially be "vetted" (is our problem serious enough?) before ever being put through to a higher level of support -- if such a thing exists. I actually do not know, because even after 2 hours and 10 minutes, the agent i chatted with yesterday didn't offer to pass me on to someone else...he just left.
Rant over. For now.
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