An AEP file serves as an Adobe After Effects project container that stores the structure of your work rather than a finished video, holding compositions, layers of all kinds, animation data like motion points and expressions, effects with settings, masks, mattes, and even 3D tools such as cameras and lights, while usually referencing external media through file paths instead of embedding footage, which keeps the AEP itself small even when the project uses huge amounts of video or audio.
Because the AEP stores links instead of embedded media, After Effects can show “missing footage” if you move or rename your sources or bring only the AEP to another machine without its assets, so transferring a project normally means using Collect Files or gathering everything into one folder to keep the references intact, and if an AEP doesn’t load in After Effects, context clues—its origin, nearby files, Windows’ “Opens with,” or a quick text-editor check—can help determine whether it’s genuine AE or a different program’s format.
When an AEP seems incomplete on a different computer, the root cause is usually that it’s designed to reference files stored elsewhere, not contain them, with After Effects recording absolute paths to video, images, audio, and proxies, so the moment the project exists on a machine with new drive letters, renamed folders, or missing assets, AE loads the project shell but reports Missing/Offline Media until you relink all sources.
If you cherished this post and you would like to receive extra data about AEP file type kindly pay a visit to our own web page. A project may look “broken” even with footage intact when the new machine lacks specific fonts—forcing text to substitute—or missing plugins that leave effects unreadable, or when using an older After Effects version that can’t interpret newer features, and the dependable solution is to use Collect Files or replicate the folder layout exactly and then relink, at which point matching fonts, plugins, and paths generally restore the project immediately.
An AEP file acts as a compact database for your After Effects project, which is why it can store an entire motion-graphics setup without matching the size of your footage, capturing details about comps—their resolution, frame rate, duration, nesting, and background—along with every timeline layer and its transforms such as spatial placement, scale, rotation, opacity, blend modes, mattes, parenting, and timing, plus animation elements including keyframes, easing, motion-blur settings, markers, expressions, and full effect setups, as well as masks or roto shapes with their paths, feather, expansion, and animated points.
When 3D features are active, an AEP contains camera setups, light configurations, 3D layer parameters, and render options, as well as organizational metadata like bins, label colors, interpretation rules, and sometimes proxy info, but it typically excludes the footage—MP4s, MOVs, images, and WAVs are stored separately—so the AEP serves as the recipe and the file-location references to those assets, meaning misplaced files trigger missing-media prompts.
