After Effects Network Render

[OneMillionBC]

Hi there,

I have searched the web high and low, I've checked all the forums and I can't seem to find any form of identical problem, let alone a solution, and it's driven me to the point of anger.

I am attempting to set up a network render for a heavy-duty animation in After Effects. I'm using my Macbook Laptop and an older iMac. I have follwed every instruction and tutorial to the letter and I have created a network 'watch folder' with the correct permissions and double/triple checked my settings. I open After Effects render engine on the iMac and everything goes well until I select the watch folder. First it identifies the project I want to render, then it opens it, but I get a dialogue box stating that my project was created with Mercury Playback Engine, which it hasn't been. I only work with Software Renders and do not rely on Mercury because it's too buggy and I don't really have the leg-room for buggy. Anyway all I can do is click okay, at which point it loads everything into the queue and seems to be beginning the render. Next thing it clears the queue and begins searching the watch folder again, this time not detecting anything and it loops like this until I click cancel.

Out of answers, energy and time - in that order. Please... Anybody... Help...

Thank you all in advance.

[foughtthelaw]

just to be safe. open up your project settings and click the "Video Rendering and Effects" tab and make sure you're using "mercury software only"

If you were using either of the other two options, switch to software only, save a new version of your file to the watch folder and then try again.

[OneMillionBC · Accepted solution]

Firstly, thank you so much for your reply. As it turned out, this wasn't the issue, I had to go through the project systematically (resulting in it being late by 4 days) only to discover that ONE plugin hadn't auto-updated by a single decimal figure.

All together now...

Sigh...

Think it would be great for Adobe to integrate the error messages that report such things in After Effects into the Render Engine, just to speed things like this along.

Thank you again, foughtthelaw, I really do appreciate helpfulness. Do take care.