Reconnecting Missing Files in After Effects

After Effects 04/10/2019 2 min read

Overview

This After Effects tutorial will teach you how to reconnect any missing files that you might have in your After Effects templates or projects. In it, Tyler covers a quick and easy way to find any missing files in your project, as well as, the solution to relink them with the necessary files on your computer.

Transcription

Hello everyone. Tyler here for Motionarray.com and in this After Effects tutorial I want to show you how to reconnect any missing files or any missing footage that you might have in your After Effects project.

So, the first thing I’m going to do is just open up a project that I know has missing footage, and as you can see we are greeted with this warning saying that four files are missing since we last saved the project. So, I’m just going to click Okay and once this loads up we’re going to see these nice color bars. These color bars basically represent every missing file that we have in the project.

So, the first step is to come over to the Project Panel and in the search field I’m just going to search for missing. What this will do is pull up any missing file that is in our project. I’m just going to highlight this first one here, Scale.mov. I’m going to right click it, come down to Replace Footage and File. What this will do is pull up a Finder window and in this other search field I’m going to search for this exact file. So, I’m going to type scale.mov and this will search my entire computer looking for this file and if it finds it, it will be listed down here below. As you can see I have many different instances of it here. I’m just going to click this top one and I’m going to click Open.

Now we’ve reconnected the scale movie, but we’ve also found three previously missing items so I’m going to click Okay. As you can see over here on the left all four files are now reconnected and everything is good to go. If you still have missing files in your project all you need to do is repeat the same process until everything is reconnected.

So, that’s it. That’s how you reconnect missing files in your After Effects projects. Thanks for watching, and I hope you learned something.


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