Migrating Adobe After Effects Projects
Hello, Habrdyudi!
After a small epic with the transfer of Adobe After Effects projects from one computer to another, I want to share the experience gained so that people know what they can expect.
At first, a trivial task turned into a small quest - Adobe After Effects project files (.aep) do not contain relative paths to the materials used in the project (footage), but absolute ones.
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Which means that simply transferring the folder in which the project itself and all the materials involved are stored is not enough. Attempting to open the file in this form was crowned with failure: Adobe After Effects CS6 began to give out by mistake to every file not found, and after a couple of dozen of such files refused to work at all. Changing absolute paths through a text editor also does not roll, I tried. After various vain attempts, I had to go back to the original computer and Google. Google suggested that good Adobe came up with a special function for transferring projects:
Collect Files feature. How to use it there are many lessons . This is certainly good for a single project, but what about the whole bundle of honestly acquired projects? It turns out that for this Adobe invented a special item in the menu - Consolidate All Footage (Combine All Materials)
Throw all your projects into one, select this item from the drop-down menu, and Adobe After Effects removes all duplicates of the materials used, and ties all the links to the one remaining copy.
And I already began to rejoice and was going to sacrifice a goblin bull to the great Adobe, but it was not there. This system would work well for spherical projects in a vacuum, but I then had several dozen projects that were modified copies of each other (these were the backdrops for TV shows, if anyone is interested .) Because of the large nesting of tracks, projects it was easier to clone and modify than to create copies of each composition within one project. If you transfer all projects as separate, then all materials (footage) used in each project would be duplicated N times (Collect Files takes the folder hierarchy not from the file system, but from the organization inside the project, as a result, for each of the .aep files a separate folder was created with all the materials used). The Consolidate All Footage feature was supposed to cope with this, but it combined the nested compositions from different projects that shouldn’t interact with each other, although they looked identical. It turned out porridge, with which it was impossible to work.
As a result, it’s not so difficult to transfer a couple of projects, but it’s not clear what people who have dozens of projects number in dozens of projects. It only remains to hope that Adobe will eventually realize the power of relative paths, and there will be a holiday on our street.
After a small epic with the transfer of Adobe After Effects projects from one computer to another, I want to share the experience gained so that people know what they can expect.
At first, a trivial task turned into a small quest - Adobe After Effects project files (.aep) do not contain relative paths to the materials used in the project (footage), but absolute ones.
')
Which means that simply transferring the folder in which the project itself and all the materials involved are stored is not enough. Attempting to open the file in this form was crowned with failure: Adobe After Effects CS6 began to give out by mistake to every file not found, and after a couple of dozen of such files refused to work at all. Changing absolute paths through a text editor also does not roll, I tried. After various vain attempts, I had to go back to the original computer and Google. Google suggested that good Adobe came up with a special function for transferring projects:
Collect Files feature. How to use it there are many lessons . This is certainly good for a single project, but what about the whole bundle of honestly acquired projects? It turns out that for this Adobe invented a special item in the menu - Consolidate All Footage (Combine All Materials)
Throw all your projects into one, select this item from the drop-down menu, and Adobe After Effects removes all duplicates of the materials used, and ties all the links to the one remaining copy.
And I already began to rejoice and was going to sacrifice a goblin bull to the great Adobe, but it was not there. This system would work well for spherical projects in a vacuum, but I then had several dozen projects that were modified copies of each other (these were the backdrops for TV shows, if anyone is interested .) Because of the large nesting of tracks, projects it was easier to clone and modify than to create copies of each composition within one project. If you transfer all projects as separate, then all materials (footage) used in each project would be duplicated N times (Collect Files takes the folder hierarchy not from the file system, but from the organization inside the project, as a result, for each of the .aep files a separate folder was created with all the materials used). The Consolidate All Footage feature was supposed to cope with this, but it combined the nested compositions from different projects that shouldn’t interact with each other, although they looked identical. It turned out porridge, with which it was impossible to work.
As a result, it’s not so difficult to transfer a couple of projects, but it’s not clear what people who have dozens of projects number in dozens of projects. It only remains to hope that Adobe will eventually realize the power of relative paths, and there will be a holiday on our street.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/150337/
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