After Effects Cross Platform Footage Path

I’m seeing some really weird behavior when trying to render an After Effects project from a Mac on our WIndows 7 based render farm. We’re on Deadline 4.1 and the error I get is below:

0: STDOUT: aerender Error: After Effects error: Unable to Render: File Sequence Not Found: \Volumes\MT033\BGT\Finals\Main_show_v10_0, Main_show_v10.[00001-14849].png.

You’ll notice there’s a comma in there where a \ should be. The rest of the footage for the project is found with out a problem. My thought was it was a path mapping problem but I learned that Deadline cannot map footage paths within the AE project. I’m on a project now and this issue is quite a problem for us.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thx.

V

I think I’ve seen this before, and it was as issue with After Effects. The client who was seeing this confirmed it was an AE problem by rendering with aerender.exe from the command line outside of Deadline. He posted this on Adobe’s forums, which ended in them asking him to file a bug report:
forums.adobe.com/thread/909883

Because it’s an AE bug, there unfortunately isn’t anything we can do about it from Deadline’s end. It seemed to be a one-off issue for him though, as he’s confirmed that he hasn’t seen it since this one time. Maybe there’s just some corruption in this particular AE project file…

Cheers,

  • Ryan

But it can…?

Save the AE file as an .aepx (XML) and deadline is able to do path swapping (if you have set it up correctly in the repo settings…).

Cheers
Timor

Thanks for the responses. It turns out some of the footage was outside of the folder/subfolder where the AE project was and that was causing the problem. The error message with the oddly formatted path didn’t help but we were able to render after moving footage around.

V

just for your info:

putting the footage into the folder where your .aep script resides is no longer necessary if you follow my advice above…