Bit of a doozy with AfterEffects (2017 and 2019). File created on Mac, rendering on Windows. Using aepx files to allow remapping of absolute paths. Normally works fine. But for one of our shows, a couple of shots have hit an issue where AfterEffects will report that it can’t open one of the source files.
The first thing we do is prove that the path it gives is valid on the slave, and it can be opened inside AfterEffects on the slave. So already the message is suspect. Then, making sure we’re not missing something, we grab the re-pathed temp file from the Deadline slave job data dir while the job is running. We can then run basically the same command that DL runs with that copy of the file, and it works!
After much confusing, we place the file in hand made directory inside a fake job dir in the DL data directory, and it fails. So something about the location of the aepx file confounds AE despite the fact that it has a correct absolute path to work with.
This really strikes me as an AE problem, not DL, but anyone want to take a guess what’s going on?
We did notice in the aepx file that it includes some sort of depth hints with the reference paths…