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After Effects 6.5 on OS X crippled beyond belief
I’m trying to use AE on OS X to pull in projects previously developed on Windows XP. All of the footage files are in AVI format. Our archives contain thousands of such files.
After Effects 6.5 on the Mac won’t read them right away. If I transfer an old project to my Mac (they’re archived on external firewire drives) and try to edit it, all of the files show up as “Missing”. To import the AVI files I have to right-click each one in the project. In the dialog box that comes up, I have to switch “All Footage Files” to “All Files”, browse to the specific file I want, and click Open. At that point the file will show up.
There are two problems.
The first problem is that After Effects, for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend, is truncating all the filenames to 32 characters. This is a problem because the archive files will often contain more than 32 characters in the filename, and the important bit will be at the very end of the name (eg, “Mayor at new groudbreaking ceremony CLOSE UP.avi” versus “Mayor at new groundbreaking ceremony WIDE.avi”). This makes it an enormous pain to figure out which file I need to replace.
The second problem is that many of these projects contain hundreds of files. Manually replacing footage for each file one-by-one is a huge waste of time.
I don’t have any of these problems with Quicktime files. If a project contains a large of number of QuickTime files, after I find-and-replace the first missing file, then After Effects will automatically replace all the others (assuming they’re all in the same directory, which is the case.)
So why can’t AE on the Mac import AVI the same way? Does anyone have a workaround for me?
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1 Reply
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As for the truncating, that’s probably related to afb versus smb reasons. That’s at the OS level and not AE. We get that at the office when trying to copy files from/to our Macs on OSX and through a Microsoft Exchange Server.
Are the archives on an Exchange server?
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