Mac Collected Project Issues on Windows

[Bret Hampton]

Sometimes Mac filenames don’t place nice with Windows. Mac users are often used to making up filenames with symbols Windows can’t read.

The way many people deal with this is always use this naming convention on either OS. This insures both can open/save files

Program_Date_Job_Part_1

Very simple, never leave blank spaces. Always separate words with underscore. Numbers only, no symbols.

Try duplicating a questionable file, then renaming it as above to test.

[William Saviola]

Thanks Bret.

All good points. Unfortunately, this is just impossible when the project is huge with tons of imported projects within a project.

So from your experience, the only way to try to fix the issue is to go and rename certain files that may be too long or have symbols etc In them.

I did that today and the project still continued to crash and not let me work init.

Just seems ridiculous there is no other way to stop this.

[Eric Santiago]

Have you checked if the PDFs are in CMYK?

AE does not like that format.

Must always be RGB.

I could be wrong, that issue was an old one.

[Daniel Griffin]

I had the same problem a couple weeks ago. I almost had a heart attack. Renaming the files to shorter names and replacing them in the project helped me save the project. There is software to rename multiple filenames, I’ve used Name Mangler in the past https://manytricks.com/namemangler/

[Eric Santiago]

Did you also get a report txt file from the Consolidated/Collected projects?

Open it in notepad and do a search for *.pdf.

You can do the same in Windows Exploder and weed out the PDFs to see if any have odd naming practices.

Could be soup to nuts with that error your getting 😛

[William Saviola]

Some excellent advice.

Thank you all!