After Effects - Dynamic Link, Media Core & Quicktime crashes or hangs

The Problem

Out of the blue today After Effects starting crashing on start up when initialising Mediacore with a cryptic error message mentioning Dynamiclink. The error message changed constantly so this clearly wasn't going to lead me to a solution.

Looking aroung the net regarding Mediacore and Dynamiclink errors seemed to be leading no-where until I stumbled across a few potential fixes. In the interest of saving others some time here's a compilation of the fixes for this issue that don't involve removing everything and starting again.

Solutions

Quicktime Errors

This seems to be the most common cause of these errors and is rarely mentioned when you search for the obvious terms like Dynamiclink and Mediacore. The list of potential issues is large enough I will simply link to the official Adobe list of problems and their solutions, however the one that worked for me was to check my audio devices and set everything back to the default onboard devices.

Adobe's Quicktime troubleshooting page

Broken/Corrupt Preferences

Mostly common following an After Effects crash while working on something, especially if you have edited the default workspaces or made new ones.

To solve this you will need to delete you're existing preferences and allow After Effects to re-create the files with the default settings. These files are contained within a directory that is hidden so you may need to show hidden files in your folder options in order to access them. This can be found in the Folder Options section of the Control Panel under the View tab.

Your preferences files are stored in the following locations:

• (Mac OS) <drive>/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/10.0
• (Windows) <drive>\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\10.0

Just delete the entire "10.0" folder (or other version, they function the same) and it will be re-created next time you launch After Effects.

Mediacore/Quicktime Cannot Communicate

This is when Mediacore attempts to initialise Quicktime but Quicktime is unable to communicate online and thus refuses to initialise causing Mediacore to loop indefinitely. This problem most commonly does not show an error but After Effects will hang on starting when it tries to initialise Mediacore.

To solve this you must add an exception to the Windows Firewall to allow After Effects to communicate with the Quicktime servers.

How to add a firewall exception

Corrupt memorybalancers.xml

This seems to be the least common issue and occurs when After Effects has "hard crashed" and was unable to perform the tasks it would normally complete when it detects a crash. For example, if the PC had a bluescreen while using After Effects.

When this happens it is possible for the memorybalancers file to become corrupt which causes Mediacore to enter a repeating loop and eventually crash.

To solve this you will need to delete the memorybalancers<version>.xml file and allow After Effects to create a new one.

Your memorybalancers<version>.xml file is stored in the following locations:

• (Mac OS) <drive>/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe/dynamiclinkmanager
• (Windows) <drive>\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\dynamiclinkmanager

I hope this information saves others some time in solving this most frustrating issue!