From the course: After Effects 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

Using the exercise files and relinking footage - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

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Using the exercise files and relinking footage

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- This course includes exercise files. As you may know, the way that you work with source videos, stills and audio in After Effects is to import it into a project. The example projects have source already imported, but there's one thing that can add an extra step to working with them properly. Sometimes in the process of moving them, the source files become unlinked and After Effects can't find them. In such cases, you simply need to relink the source, which I'll show you how to do right now. So, suppose that you open an example project from this course, and you see something like this. Color bars. If you use After Effects for any period of time, you will run into this at some point. And it's by design. After Effects is elegantly designed so that the project itself doesn't contain all of the source footage, which can be many gigabytes or more. So instead, it links to them. And when you move them, they can become unlinked. So, all you have to do in this course is look inside the source folder for the files that are unlinked. And I'm in my Project panel here. Also in the Project panel, with any project, you can type in missing, and that will also find the unlinked files. You can see their little color bar icons as well. So, all I need to do is right-click. Get this context menu that lets me choose Replace Footage, File. And I've gone straight to where the file is. So, I have my examples folder on my desktop. I'm going into Footage and Source. And there is the one I'm looking for, the one with the same name, which is drone-sb-hd. And automatically, because the other files were in that same folder, After Effects finds them, and we're ready to go.

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