After Effects 2022 won't save/export/import or respond to anything!
Recently After Effects has not been letting me save my projects. At some point during my time working on a project, After Effects becomes unresponsive and when clicking save/save as, nothing happens. It does not save. It seemed like anything to do with accessing files just wasn't responsive. I can't import/export, choose where to render to, or most importantly save!! Today however, it happened again and so I just tried to render to the default chosen file, but it wouldn't even respond to anything I click. When hovering over buttons like 'render' it would show the hover selection appearance but when clicking nothing would happen. I couldn't do anything. When paying this much money for these applications and they're this unusable its disgusting.

Hi all,
Thank you all for reporting this issue. A fix for being unable to save or access other file browsing dialogs like import, export, etc, is available in the latest After Effects 22.6. Please update to that version and do let us know if you encounter this problem again.
A full list of the issues fixed in After Effects 22.6 ( including this one ) is available here: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/kb/fixed-issues.html
We apologize for the frustration this issue has caused and we appreciate you reporting it so that it could be fixed as soon as possible.
- John, After Effects Engineering Team
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Brian Sadler commented
Same Issue here, for multiple sessions. "Save" was greyed out. "Save As" produced spinning beachball. Auto-Save stopped saving. Lost hours of work.
MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021), 12.4
M1 Max
32 GB -
Geoffrey HAJIM commented
It's crazy that an application as old as this one (I've been using it since 1994) has such a basic bug. I just lost a half hour's worth of worth because all Save functions just stopped. No Auto Save. No Save As. No Save. None of it works. Adobe needs to fix this pronto.
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Larissa Reinhart commented
I wasn't able to save. I had no other application open or running. And I just wasn't able to save. I tried every possible of saving and it just would not save. Now I lost one hour of progress and there was nothing I could do...
I also couldn't find any articles on the Adobe Support covering this issue... -
Cem Perin commented
AE randomly stops saving projects; Save, Save As, Auto Save, Collect, Quit application prompt to save, none of them work; not grayed out, they’re still clickable, just nothing happens and you still see the black dot within the red circle on the left top corner, and when you quit the application and click save at the prompt, it’ll go ahead and close the application but not save.
It happens at random times, sometimes couple of minutes after I open the project, sometimes couple of hours. So far the problem only developed after working on the project for a while, but if a project has this issue even once, then my experience is it will have it FOREVER on that project. Tried creating a new project and importing the old project into it, does not work, once it’s gone, it’ll be a randomized time bomb, you’ll never know when it’ll stop saving.
I’ve had the same problem happening for the second time now. First time I encountered it being a month ago on a different project, with plugins. Thought it was a plugin issue or the project got corrupted (somehow?), talked to Adobe support, they couldn’t fix it and I just moved on.
Now a month later, I’m having the exact same problem after working more than 10 hours on a brand new project, without plugins, on a newer version of AE, newer macOS build, new assets, less plugins installed than before (all up to date).
I’m on a MacBook Pro M1 Max. Have been using it since January, never had any issues.
I believe it happened after the native m1 support update (which was 22.3?).
Opening Intel/Rosetta version or not, problem persists on both.Gave AE a lot of access under privacy and security, changed the folder permissions (of Adobe folders, documents / library included, and the project folders) to read & write (on all profiles), even created and logged in as root user, nothing.
This time it started with the preview not updating when I undo something. Soon after it started not saving so I just had to lose my work. Exporting to Media Encoder queue is an option, since it’ll create a project file, but it won’t retain all the files/comps (as far as I know, just the ones linked to the comp you sent to the queue).
Already uninstalled and reinstalled AE, didn’t fix it, so my only option is to uninstall all Adobe software via Adobe’s cleaner tool and see. Wondering if anyone had something similar on an M1 Mac or on another device, and hoping someone has a solution so I don’t have to do a clean install.
Update: After checking forums and Reddit threads and seeing similar problems, I checked whether if I can trigger this problem and I was successful; when I turn off Wi-Fi, it won’t save, turning Wi-Fi on after doesn’t fix it unless the project is restarted. Since I always had my Wi-Fi on before I encountered this problem, my guess is that whenever there is a disturbance in Wi-Fi signal it triggers this behavior. Tested with two different physical locations, 2 different service providers with different speeds and different routers.