This isn't totally isolated to After Effects, but it's where we first noticed the problem:
We are trying to use After Effects with project assets stored on network drives and are experiencing temperamental issues with assets, particularly jpgs, not displaying in the composition window or project preview panes. When these 'network' issues occur they also seem to affect other Adobe apps (i.e. Photoshop).
When this problem occurs 1, or both of these happen; the asset preview in the project pane is black, the asset in a composition is black. Occasionally, if we scrub the timeline, whilst holding the mouse button, an image appears, but when we stop scrubbing and release the button the asset goes black again. Or, there is no image (the entire pane has nothing in it) and a blank but black image appears when scrubbing. Sometimes fiddling with the resolution sample factor (in the composition pane) can fix the problem, or make the image briefly appear, but this is not consistent - the same behaviour occurs when changing the quality and sampling in the timeline pane. Also, when this display problem occurs the collect files function does not work (it just hangs) and AE must be terminated - if the assets display then this collect function works. Similarly with Photoshop, attempting to open the same asset reports 'Could not complete your request because an unknown or invalid JPEG marker type is found'. On 1 occasion in After Effects the image appeared, but looked like a corrupted file where the top half displayed correctly but the bottom didn't, and on another I had an error message appear - I have only had these 2 appear once (once each).
This didn't seem to occur with AE 2017, and I've noticed this article 'Networks and removable media with Digital Video' (from 2017) recommends against this workflow but you'd think if it wasn't advised/supported it wouldn't have worked with AE 2017. Note, there isn't a new article stating any changes to this.
These jpgs are not corrupt, they work locally. On the network drives they sometimes work, sometimes they don't.
Can we actually use AE this way? Or do we have to change our workflow? How does Premiere work with assets (not the project) on a network?
Our client machines are iMacs (running 10.12.6), we're using AE 2018 (15.1.2 Build 69) and the network drives are connected via SMB - AFP and CIFS exhibit the same problem. We have 27 clients, and the problem doesn't occur consistently on all of them, but it occurs enough for it to be a huge pain.