- Posts: 21
- Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2019 5:17 pm
- Real Name: bill borschtwrighthe
I've seen this happen once or twice before. Often the comp can be salvaged with a text editor. You'll need a programmers editor, such as Notepad++. You could go through and look for missing brackets, but usually the simplest approach is to just extract the Tools table.
Open the comp using your code editor and set the Language to Lua. If you're using Notepad++, that will let you collapse tables, which makes extracting the bits you need easier.
Here, I've got the comp open, and I made a New, empty file. To move the empty file to the other pane like I have here, right-click on its tab and choose "Move to Other View."
I've indicated the Language menu, where you can select the Lua language, and a '-' button next to the Tools table. If you click that -, the table will collapse to a single line. Put your cursor on the line below, then shift-click the beginning of the Tools line. Although most of the code is hidden, that will select it all. Copy and paste into the blank file in the other View. Change the language of that file to Lua also to again activate syntax highlighting.
The first line of your new file should have "Tools = {". If you place your cursor next to the curly brace, it should highlight both the brace and a line on the left, which indicates the end brace. Scroll to the end of the file to verify that the very last brace is also highlighted:
It might be hard to see there, since the blue is so close to black, but you can see that the dark blue line ends at that last brace.
Add one more closing curly brace } to the very end of the file, then scroll back up to the top, add a line above "Tools = {", and put an opening brace { at the beginning. Change line 2 to read "Tools = Ordered() {".
Once that's done, you should be able to copy the code and paste it into a blank Fusion comp to get your nodes back.
You'll lose any comp-specific preferences, so double-check the Frame Format and frame rate settings.
If you ever need a reminder of exactly what it should look like, just make a couple of random nodes, copy them, and paste into your code editor to see what the structure should be.
Edit: If this process doesn't work, then probably there was a brace or a comma that was truncated somewhere, or there's a node with corrupt inputs. Scan the file looking for non-standard text—everything should be human-readable, and if you find something that isn't, that's likely the cause of the crash. Fixing that might be more difficult, but it's often still possible.