AE puzzle - what's this symbol?
 

I've been working on this project for a while, and I've just noticed that there's a funny icon next to some of the files..

It may be a simple thing that I've not figured out, but next to core value2.avi, there's an example of the icon. (it's at the bottom right of the avi icon.

Above it there are some other AVIs and it's not on them....

I'm using AE 7, with Nucleo pro.

Anyone recognise it?

Is your AVI a still or just in the stills folder? At first I thought you may have imported as an image sequence by mistake, which changes the icon. But in CS3 the icon looks nothing like that. Try importing again, see if it still happens.

nah, that's just my bad organisation... :-) there's nothing unusual about it.

I wonder if it's something about it being located on a network drive or something, but I'm pretty sure it's not...

I don't use after effects (well, I have, but I haven't used it in at least a year or so) so I'm not too familiar with it, but it looks like that's one of the icons for windows media player, so I thought I would throw my 2 cents in here, on the off-chance of it being any help.

What icon does that file have if you look at it from My Computer or Windows Explorer? Is it the same? If so, then I bet that After Effects just uses the icon of the default program that is set to open those files (at least, it looks that way to me judging from the other .jpeg files), and so with an update to Windows Media Player or something similar, your computer is now set to play that kind of file in WMP by default, so the icon that AE shows changed.

I use a mac, so I don't recall how to switch which program opens a certain file extension by default, but my guess is that if you right click on the file from My Computer or Windows Explorer, you could find an "Open With..." option, which will pop up a dialog box to select which application you would like to open the file with, and somewhere on that dialog box there would be a checkbox for something like "Always open files with the extension .xxx with this progam." or something similar.

If this is the case though, then it really isn't very important that you change the icon back unless it helps you to better organize your files. The change in icon in this case wouldn't mean anything to AE in the way it handles that file.

Hope that helps! Good luck!

I think that's the icon for a stills sequence. Like a series of sequentially numbered tiffs that get imported as a kind of pseudo movie file. Maybe AE interpreted your avi that way because it's in a folder called stills. I don't know.

Goto the clip properties and see how AE is interpreting that particular file.

AFAIK, the icon means that this is an avi file with only video, no audio. The same type icon will also appear in .mov files with no audio.

nope, the video has audio...

I had a bit of a revelation yesterday... I think it may be something to do with when you replace footage...

I haven't done any tests to back this up, but I noticed the icons had appeared yesterday, and I'd replaced some footage too...

hmmm...