Error: Unable to set "startTime"

[chrisdukes]

I get this error when I try to replicate:

Error: After Effects error: Unable to set "startTime". Value -11926.68 our of range -10800 to 10800.

Screenshot:

Also, when I preview the current job, all of the footage is replaced and time shifts as expected, but it hangs on Changing Footage and never finishes.

Thanks!

[Jeff]

@chrisdukes

I’ve seen this error come up once before when working with Templater. It seems to have something to do with how After Effects calculates the time values in the project. The last time I ran into this error, it was solved by downgrading to an earlier version of After Effect 2022, so you might start by giving that a shot.

If that works, it’s possible that Adobe might have changed how some of the time calculations are done in AE 2022. We haven’t seen many reports of this issue, so it might be some combination of a change that Adobe made and some Time Sculpting configuration that we haven’t run into yet.

If downgrading doesn’t work, we’ll probably need to take a closer look at how Templater is configured on the system. I’d recommend shooting us a message at support@dataclay.com with the templater.log file, some screenshots of the project and how it’s laid out, as well as any other information about the project that you think is relevant.

Thanks!

[veteos]

@jeff were you guys ever able to identify the source of this issue? We’re having the same error pop up on one of our projects.

[Jeff]

@veteos

We never heard back from Chris, so we never got a chance to examine the issue in more detail. As previously mentioned, the only other time we ran into this problem, it was “fixed” by downgrading to AE 22.0. We’d definitely be interested in digging into this issue more so we can assist other users who run into this problem in the future.

If you have the time, I’d recommend opening a ticket with support@dataclay.com and sending us over the templater.log files as well as some screenshots of the project file, the Templater Preferences panel, and any ExtendScripts that might be running on the system. Hopefully, with a bit more information, we should be able to narrow down what’s causing this.

Thanks!

[veteos]

@jeff Hi Jeff, thanks for the quick response. We were able to narrow the issue down to a single comp that was, in our case, several years outdated and no longer being used within the project. After deleting this comp, everything started functioning correctly again. We tried to identify the specific source of the issue within this comp to help
others who might experience this issue in teh future, but the best we could do was find some funky Templater settings (like time sculpting set to itself) resulting in the comp (that should have been about a minute) being over 3 hours. Hope that helps!

[Jeff]

@veteos

Thanks for letting us know what you found. This diagnosis aligns with our assumption that that error is caused by a logic problem with a Time Sculpting layer. Hopefully, this will help in troubleshooting this sort of problem if it comes up again in the future.

Thanks again!