Footage in After FX from Premiere disappears

[markblasco]

I put together a video in Premier that is about 7 minutes long. I did all of the edits, and now I'm ready to do some color correction and effects.

I opened up After Effects and imported my Premiere Pro Project (I did not use dynamic link, since I need to color correct each clip separately). All of the clips opened into new layers in After Effects, which is great.

OK, now for the problem. I saved the After Effects project, and closed it. When I try to reopen the project, all of the footage is missing, and replaced with color bars.

I tried several times to import a premiere project into After Effects, and every time, it is fine until I save it and leave the program, but once I try to open it again, it can't find any of the footage.

I also tried to render it before closing the project, and it renders with color bars replacing all of the video footage.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong here? It seems like I am doing things right, since the project seems to work fine when I create it, but as soon as I close it or try to render it, it cannot find any of the footage.


CS4 Production suite on an i7 XP machine with 6 gigs of ram. Everything is running on the machine, no networked drives (I have one drive for the OS, one for the media files, and one for audio samples and scratch disk). The files are all MTS (AVCHD) files. I'm updated to AFX 9.0.2


I also now tried taking individual clips in premiere and right clicking, and replacing them with after effects. It pulled them in, and I applied some effects. They linked between Premiere Pro and After Effects fine, until I saved both files and closed them. When I reopened premiere, I now get the color bars replacing all of the after effects clips.

What is interesting is that I have also imported an after effects file which has no video (it is an animated title), and that one stays linked even after closing. The only difference there (other than it not having any video) is that I created that animation in after effects and later imported it, instead of pulling it first from premiere.

If someone has an idea of how to fix this, I would really appreciate it. As of right now, I really can't use After Effects for color correction and stabilization, which is what I need it to do for this project.

 

[Cassius]

Can you copy the video and past it in After Effects instead? Just hit ctrl+a to select all of them, copy, past. See if it does the same thing. I have no idea why yours wouldn't work, but that's the method I use.

 

[Jordan_S]

What happens when you save or render an AE project that contains an imported PP project without any changes?

 

[markblasco]

What happens when you save or render an AE project that contains an imported PP project without any changes?

It isn't working. I tried making a new PP project with just one video shot, cut down to just a couple of seconds (still just one clip in the timeline). I saved that, then imported it into AE. I then saved the AE file, closed it, and when I went to re-open it, it could not find the footage.

 

[markblasco]

Can you copy the video and past it in After Effects instead? Just hit ctrl+a to select all of them, copy, past. See if it does the same thing. I have no idea why yours wouldn't work, but that's the method I use.

Nope, it's still doing the same thing. I copied the clip from PP timeline, pasted it into a comp in AE, and saved AE. When I closed the file and reopened it, it said the footage was missing.

 

[markblasco]

OK, so this is interesting. I opened up the AE file again, and still got the missing footage message. I tried taking one of the pieces of footage and right clicking, than selecting replace footage. I found the same clip that had been used originally, and selected that. It looked like the computer had frozen, but I saw in the upper right hand window that it was "conforming" some of the video clips. When it got down the list to the clip that I had selected to replace, all of a sudden it found all of the clips, and they all were working again. I saved the file and reopened it, and now it is working correctly.

Any ideas of what may be the cause of this? Tomorrow I am going to try adding some more clips from the same PP project into AE and see if it now will resolve all of them, or only the ones it "conformed" earlier.