I have a Premiere project with a large amount of dynamically linked After Effects files (150+) that has been working smoothly for weeks. However, last night, all of the dynamic link files stopped working suddenly — they are still in the project but all show as "Media Pending," but the location of the After Effects linked files has not moved and those files are perfectly fine (not corrupted, still openable and editable).
I tried relaunching Premiere and loading the project again, but the project will not load all the media on launch — it opens normally, but it always hangs at the exact same point while loading media and will not load any further, and all of the After Effects linked comps remain unlinked. When I try to manually link any non-dynamic link media, it works just fine. However, when I try to manually link the dynamic link media, I get the rainbow wheel and Premiere becomes unresponsive and needs to be force quit. Even if I don't try to link media, whenever I close the project or try to quit Premiere, it becomes unresponsive and I need to force quit. I've replicated this dozens of times.
Here's a list of what I've tried so far, all with the exact same result:
- Opening an older saved version of the project
- Opening autosaves of the project from before the issue started
- Updating PPro and AE to their latest versions (14.4 and 17.1.4, respectively)
- Uninstalling PPro and AE and reinstalling the latest versions
- Versioning PPro and AE back to previous versions
- Restarting my system several times, often between uninstalling and reinstalling
- Duplicating the AE project files and importing those into the PPro project (this seems to work until the project is quit, and then the next time it launches, the files do not link)
- Creating a fresh AE project and comp that has no media associated with the project and importing that into the PPro project
- Probably a few more that I've forgotten (it's been a long day)
I've spent hours in chat and on phone with Adobe support, during which I've done several clean installs of the programs (including a "trial" version via direct download link) and the problem persists. They've had me rename several Adobe system folders, including the dynamic link server, with the "old" suffix so they'd be replaced on next launch, but that hasn't helped. The dynamic link manager often becomes unresponsive along with Premiere when quitting.
I've also tried to import this project into a new Premiere project, which has been unsuccessful. The project is fairly large, but even with waiting over an hour after clicking "Import," Premiere is unresponsive and the progress bar is at 0%. I've tried importing other (albeit smaller) projects that don't have dynamic links and they work perfectly.
This does not appear to be an issue with Media Cache files, either — it seems to me that there is a clear distinction between when Premiere is "loading media" versus "generating peak files" in the bottom-right status bar, and this is hanging while loading media. My media cache was just recreated yesterday (many hours before this issue happened) and is on a dedicated SSD. It could be worth purging it another time, but again, it doesn't seem like this is where the problem is. If my assumptions here are wrong, please let me know.
I can't pinpoint when the problem started or what exactly caused it. The only thing I can think of was that I tried using a third-party audio plugin, which crashed Premiere, and then I uninstalled the whole plugin pack right away. The problem definitely started after that, but I don't recall how immediately.
There is always the option to just export the AE files from AE and import those into Premiere, which I'm sure would work fine, but it's a super pain and defeats the whole purpose of dynamic link — which, again, had been working flawlessly for weeks.
What am I missing here? Any help much appreciated, I'm tearing my hair out over this...
iMac 5K 27" 2017 | MacOS Catalina 10.15.6
3.4GHz quad-core i5
40GB RAM
Radeon Pro 570 4GB
(not the craziest specs, but it generally works just fine with 4K footage and a proxy workflow)
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