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File hung upon start up
Hello,
I am having some pretty serious problems with an After Effects file (CS4). I’m not sure if I can detail all of the information, but if I can gain some insight as to what is occurring, I will be most appreciative! Here is what I know:While I was preparing to render (not actually rendering, but just before) After Effects hung. I ended the program after a few minutes. Now when I try to load it up again, I see all of the files and layers but it is clearly hung again (the mouse pointer is doing the black to white loading animation). When I try to click on anything I get a white screen, so I end the program.
I have to be very careful with this file; there are some pretty big images with a light, a camera, and a few dozen movie clips. It seems to have the tendency to freeze and then corrupt itself if I don’t let it load at its own pace.
I have had issues with this file before (I have already started over). Is there anyway that I can extract the information? I have a whole day of work stored in there. I was just about to render and be done with it!
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4 Replies
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The first things I’d try are making sure I’m running the project and source media from a fast drive, freeing up as much system resources as possible (quitting any unnecessary background processes) and giving AE lots of extra time to load the project at its own pace … it sounds like a pretty heavy project so it may just be taking much longer than your use to and, in those situations, I’ve found clicking things only makes it worse and sometimes leads to that white screen, which in my case, hasn’t necessarily meant a hang.
Hopefully, trying those things will do it because, being that you forced AE to close the last time you had the project working, that may have corrupted the project file. If that’s the case, hopefully you have a backup copy … if not, you might consider making project file backups a natural part of your workflow. If a project file isn’t too badly corrupted, sometimes you can get it to open by importing it into an empty AE project instead of opening it directly.
I hope this helps and good luck!
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Thanks. Yeah, I did have a back up. However, I managed to import the file I force quit into another AE file. However, it appears that the movie files are having trouble when I render (in the new file). Is this is a sign of corruption?:
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After Effects error: File “Xxx.wmv” cannot be opened, it may be in an unsupported format. (86 :: 1)
———The movie files were working fine before.
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I’ve so rarely worked with web files like WMVs in AE that I don’t really recall whether AE usually accepts them without complaining, but I can tell you that all web video formats are among the worst types of files to use in AE. I’ve only seen that particular error message before when there were issues with a file’s encoding (typically the codec). So, I’d suggest transcoding the files to a more editing-friendly codec … perhaps DV25 MOVs … only as a balance between file size and not losing even more quality than has already been discarded for WMVs … I’d normally never recommend DV.
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[Dave LaRonde] “When you work in AE, large video file sizes can’t be a concern”
Very true and thanks correcting for my potentially confusing statement, Dave. I should clarify what I meant by “only as a balance between file size and not losing even more quality” … it seems that when people use WMVs or various flavors of MPGs for editing, the reason is usually that they refuse to accept (or their system can’t handle) the relatively “huge” files editing codecs naturally produce so I was trying to think of a codec that would make relatively small files since there would obviously be nothing other than file size gained from converting WMVs to Uncompressed or something similar.
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