Gah, at wit's end with this AE error!

C

custerc

Well-known member
Using AE CS5 I get this error whenever I try to render: After Effects error: Could not convert Unicode characters. (23 :: 46)

I searched online and found this solution to the same error code for CS3 and CS4, but I tried it and it didn't work, I'm still getting the same error message.

This happened with the other project I tried to export (which had some Chinese and English in it), but this project didn't have any characters at all in it, either, the only text is hard-rendered already from an export from Premiere Pro (which doesn't seem to have any problems with text).

What the heck is causing this? I'm running it on a MacBook Pro, 10.5, with English-US and two Chinese simplified languages as my inputs, but English US is the first one on the list. Anyway, the AMT folder has the en-us and zh-cn files, so I assume it's not an issue with that.

Does anyone know of a fix for this? If I can't get it to stop doing that, AE is completely useless to me! Agh!


(Perhaps it's obvious, but I should add, I don't have any language compatibility issues with any other CS5 programs, or at least not premiere and photoshop, which I've already used.)
 
I haven't used AE CS5, but maybe you could eliminate variables by turning off groups of layers and rendering, see if there is a certain layer that is causing the issue, and see if you can work around it?
 
Resolved this issue via the Adobe forums, but in case someone comes across it in the future and searches out this post, here's the answer:

Although none of my files or folders contained any Chinese names, I had given my hard drive itself a Chinese name. Although this doesn't cause issues for any other program I have ever used (including the rest of CS5 as far as I can tell), apparently AE couldn't handle that, and that's what was causing the issue. As soon as I changed the name of my hard drive to English and reopened AE, I was able to start rendering the file.

So in the future, if you run into this issue, check your file names, including the name of your hard drive itself, if it has one, and change them to english if need be. Not sure why AE is so xenophobic, but whatever, if it just wants English file names I can live with that.

The folks at the Adobe board said that it shouldn't have any issue rendering Chinese that's in the program itself in text layers or whatever, so while I haven't tried that yet, I feel fairly confident that when I do it will work fine.
 
Just to confirm: There is a very specific bug in a part of After Effects that converts the path names to Unicode. We're working on fixing that. This bug is very localized and shouldn't affect the use of non-roman characters elsewhere in the application. If you find otherwise, let us know with a bug report: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish
 
Again, just for the record in case someone else comes across this thread in the future, I had no problem rendering videos that had Chinese and English text. The issue was purely with the file pathnames. I assume that naming a project with a Chinese name would cause the same error for the same reason, but as long as your file paths are all roman characters, it seems like you can put whatever type of characters you want into the actual project.
 
Just had the same problem - turned out that at least one folder name containing the file used a Polish character, so I changed its name into US English and went ahead and changed the names of all the folders in the file path and it worked right away.

Thank you guys!
 
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