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World’s most bizarre AE error…
Welcome to crazytown.
So I’ve got this issue with AE and it goes like this: You copy a piece of text from a document and paste it into a text layer. When this happens, halfway through pasting, AE always decides it’s time to Auto-Save. This then causes the Auto-save to fail and AE crashes. More bizarre still, this crash always causes the adobe updater to start up, which goes straight into trying to update AE… and then freezes (along with the crash reporter for some reason).
WTF?????
This happens every time, without fail (or with fail, I should say), even with Auto-Save turned off. When you run the updater manually, it says that there are no new updates to download. All the obvious things like trashing preferences doesn’t seem to fix it. I don’t expect anyone has even heard of this issue before, but if you’ve got any ideas, let me know.
Thanks
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9 Replies
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Hi there Tristan.
Providing the AE version, OS and some hardware specs can really help you get an answer to your torment.
I remember having some sort of issue like that back in AE7. But I guess it didn´t happen all the time and I upgraded the version as well as the machine before I could actually solve the mistery.
Hope someone can help you for real.
Cheers.
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Sorry, forgot it’s no longer in my sig.
I’m running AE CS4 (9.0.2.42) and OS X 10.5.7 on a 2.4Ghz Duo iMac with 4Gb Ram.
To be honest, it was more of a funny story to tell – I had resigned myself to the fact that it was just too strange an issue to be solveable.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Thanks for your help.
I can say straight away that it’s not a footage issue – the project in question is a motion graphics animation that doesn’t use any footage. I don’t have multiprocessing or Open GL on. The only plugins I’m using are the cycore ones (though I suppose they’re no less susceptible to corruption).
I have tried to work with non-optimised footage before and experienced varying degrees of instability, but this problem is so oddly specific. It seems to happen only with this one project, but doing a save-as to a new project doesn’t seem to help, even on a different suite.
I’m not sure what the auto-update thing has to do with the problem either. Maybe nothing, not sure.
Given its limited effect, I’m not sure it’s worth a reinstall, but if it starts to become a repeat problem…
:-\
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
I was having a similar issue with the auto-save dialog box popping up, then AE crashing. After some searching around the web I was able to resolve my issue by checking the “Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access network” dialog box in the general section of the preferences.
perhaps this could work for you as well?
I’m on AE CS4, using a MacBook, Core 2 Duo with Mac OS X 10.6.3 and 4GB RAM.
joel
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Thanks Dave,
I did try that one, but I think I might have mixed the order up (ie – saving first and importing later). I’ll give it another go and see how it works out.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
That’s a really interesting thought. I’ll look into that.
Again, what’s weirding me out is the part where it always decides to save when I paste a block of text…. that’s just down-right nutty.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Are you sure its not auto saving because its crashing?
After Effects will often do an automatic save when it realizes that it has crashed or become unstable.
It usually saves the file in the same folder with the original with an _# after it. Sometimes this save file preserves your work, sometimes its corrupt. If the crash save hangs, the save file is usually corrupt.Two things I might try to keep it from crashing.
1. Try trashing your preferences. (home/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects) I find that AE’s preferences can often get corrupted and cause weird crashes. If this works, and you are running time machine, you can restore to an old version of your prefs very easily.
2. Are you pasting some weird formatting with your text? I often use a program called Plain Clip:
https://www.bluem.net/en/mac/plain-clip/ To strip the formatting from my text before I paste it into AE.Also, I found AE CS4 to be really buggy on the mac. It was in my opinion, a downgrade from CS3 because it introduced more bugs than useful features. I’m loving CS5 though, so I would seriously consider upgrading.
Need a quick break from motion graphics?
Try my game Constellation at:
https://www.paperdragongames.com -
Are you sure its not auto saving because its crashing?
Yeah, because it autosaves to the autosave folder, then crashes, then saves a “_1” version to the main folder. The “_1” version saves fine but does not include the pasted text. The autosaved version, however, is corrupted and doesn’t open.
Trashing prefs was the first thing I tried, but it didn’t seem to do much. The formatting idea was a good one, but looking at the text, it doesn’t seem to have any fancy formatting in it. I will check out that program, tho.
And yes, CS4 for Mac does seem to be buggier than CS3, but up/downgrading isn’t on the cards right now.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com -
Thanks to everyone who helped out on this issue.
In the end, the solution turned out to be (drumroll……)
Ignore it and it’ll go away.
Basically, I avoided the cut-paste action by just typing the text in. Since then, everything’s been smooth sailing. I brought up an older version of the project to see if it still happens and oddly enough I can’t seem to reproduce the problem. Whatever it was, it appears it simply can’t be bothered to bug me anymore.
Sometimes I wish all problems were like that.
Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com
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