Help a mom out?

[JoAnn]

I think it is probably overkill to post this on a pro site, but might as well start at the top. My 16 year old is an aspiring animator and has spent most of Covid social distancing creating a Lego movie using After Effects on the creative cloud with an imac 2015. It was working fine, but now nothing will render and when he tries to put it in Media Encoder, he just gets color bars. We just uploaded OS Big Sur and purchased 32GB of ram at the suggestion from an Adobe help desk person. Thinking the OS is not compatible with AE, but not sure what to do. He has put a lot of work into the project. Can we log into Creative Cloud on another computer, and if so, which would be optimal? Going forward, should he switch software to use with Mac or get a different computer and keep using After Effects? Thank you so much for any suggestions.

 

[Alex Glawion]

Hey JoAnn,
I personally prefer doing After Effects work on a PC, but there are many who use MACs. You can easily open After Effects Projects on another PC or another MAC as long as you're using the same AE Version. There might be some Path issues so be sure to export your project with assets from After Effects beforehand to make it as easy as possible.

You might try rendering out the movie directly in After Effects without using media encoder, as it sounds like media encoder is having trouble finding your footage. You can do File -> dependencies -> collect files to collect all of your footage and other dependencies into one folder. that way you might have success in exporting the movie.

Hope this helps! Going forward I think you usually have much higher performance on a PC compared to a similarly priced MAC, so that's my recommendation if your 16 year old knows how to use Win10.