After Effects crash problems

[Stephen Gentle]

Hi,

I have been making a short film recently, which I shot in HD (Sony EX3 at1080p25), and edited in Premiere. Now, this part was remarkably smooth, but now that I am doing effects, grading and finishing, I'm having a whole raft of problems.

They might be a result of my (relatively) old and low spec computer - it's a AMD Athlon 4200+ (dual core) with 2GB of ram, and an nvidia GeForce 7800GT graphics card.

Anyway, now that I have everything imported into After Effects, I can hardly do anything without it crashing - although I have been able to make precomps of most of my footage and do the effects on them, if I even scrub through the main composition (1080p with about thirty layers) it will crash... When I export it only gets about 370 frames done before crashing.

I have tried a variety of memory and OpenGL settings, but still the problem persists. Has anyone experienced this before? Is it just that I need more ram?

Thanks for any help,

Stephen

 

[Wayne D]

mmmm.......might be a bit light on in the hardware.

can you export smaller scenes - do you effects/grade - render and the recomp in PPro?

this might help on the RAM/reference issues you seem to be having

 

[Wayne D]

stephen - where abouts in QLD.........my home state!!!

 

[Tom Lowe]

well what is the error message?

BTW, there is an Adobe workflow forum here.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

I think I might be able to export it shot by shot and then reassemble it - I've had some success rendering the smaller comps individually.

well what is the error message?

BTW, there is an Adobe workflow forum here.

It doesn't have an error message. It just completly hangs and I have to kill its process... I'm not sure if it's a memory problem, because other times it does pop up a message about not being able allocate enough space for a buffer.

And I didn't post in the Adobe workflow form because it isn't really related to RED cameras...

stephen - where abouts in QLD.........my home state!!!

I'm in the western suburbs of Brisbane.

 

[Wayne D]

mackay - north queensland - was my stomping ground!!

good to see the smaller file outputs are working.......although a pain in the butt!!

 

[Tom Lowe]

It doesn't have an error message. It just completly hangs and I have to kill its process... I'm not sure if it's a memory problem, because other times it does pop up a message about not being able allocate enough space for a buffer.

When the PC crashes, there is a way to search for the specific error in the system logs. I can't remember the exact path off the top of my head, though. Why not call Adobe support and ask them?

 

[Bruce Allen]

Possibly the codec? Didn't that codec come out after After Effects CS3? Probably Adobe haven't tested for it very well.

I expect CS4 will fix the problem. Until then, try transcoding to a different codec?

EDIT: here's how to find out: move your footage to a different folder. After Effects will fail to find it and replace it with placeholders (but still apply filters on the placeholders).

Does it crash now if your render?

Either that, or it's your filters. Make sure you're up to date with all your 3rd party filters.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[amrrahmy]

if u only have a problem exporting the footage, and ur done with all ur work, u can,
empty ur os partition, defragment and set a big paging file or virtual paging file(as big as the os will let u), and export to another empty partition.
it would be slow but it wont crash(hopefully).hope this helps
if that didnt work:

problem sometimes people dont realize that when u render or even render to encode, it's uncompressed file, and u dont anticipate that u needed all that space.

u can cut the final export to smaller peaces and join or append later.
that way all the background space needed while be reset and reused, and u wont run out of space.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Possibly the codec? Didn't that codec come out after After Effects CS3? Probably Adobe haven't tested for it very well.

I expect CS4 will fix the problem. Until then, try transcoding to a different codec?

EDIT: here's how to find out: move your footage to a different folder. After Effects will fail to find it and replace it with placeholders (but still apply filters on the placeholders).

Does it crash now if your render?

Either that, or it's your filters. Make sure you're up to date with all your 3rd party filters.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

I think it might actually be the footage - it handles it pretty badly (you get two black frames maybe every five seconds, but they don't show up on renders unless you do something (like an effect, filter, mask etc.) to the clip).

There was an update for it to cope with EX1/EX3 footage, but I think that that may actually have only been premiere - it works really well there.

 

[Bruce Allen]

I think it might actually be the footage - it handles it pretty badly (you get two black frames maybe every five seconds, but they don't show up on renders unless you do something (like an effect, filter, mask etc.) to the clip).

There was an update for it to cope with EX1/EX3 footage, but I think that that may actually have only been premiere - it works really well there.

Yep that's what I thought.

Guess now you need to transcode using Premiere (not sure how you do that, I am an Avid chap).

Maybe see if you can generate proxies to another format using After Effects? And then tell After Effects to use proxies for rendering in the render settings?

Depending on length of project, it might take a realllly long time though...

BTW, can you pre-render your precomps?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Yep that's what I thought.

Guess now you need to transcode using Premiere (not sure how you do that, I am an Avid chap).

Maybe see if you can generate proxies to another format using After Effects? And then tell After Effects to use proxies for rendering in the render settings?

Depending on length of project, it might take a realllly long time though...

BTW, can you pre-render your precomps?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

I can render the precomps it seems, so it would probably be best just to make proxies of them all... But right now all I'm doing is rendering each one out, and replacing the footage with them one by one in another project.

Maybe another option would be to render the video out of Premiere, whack that at the bottom of the main comp, and then hide all the footage in the precomps. Given the effects I'm doing on them, it would probably work.

It's a bit annoying that I haven't really been able to do grading (without getting heaps of black frames) but at least the footage looks good enough for the time being. It would be nice if Premiere had a nice way to transcode a lot of footage at once - like FCP's log and transfer (I think that's what it's called).

 

[Zac_heileson@yahoo.com]

What % is your memory cache at? AE is notorious for this. Go to preferences> Memory and Cache, then lower your maximum cache size to 30%. I know it seems a little counterproductive, but just try it. i bet thats it.
This is hopefully something that will be fixed in CS4. I had fun racking my brain with the same prob when cs3 came out.

 

[JanneJansson]

This usually fix strange crashing for me:
- Disable open GL in preferences
- Change maximum memory to HIGHER (I use 20%)
- Change the maximum RAM Cache to LOWER (I use 10%)
- Turn off "Render multi frames simultaneously"

.. and upgrade your RAM

Cheers