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AE stalls frequently–killing my workflow!
Hey all,
AE CS4 keeps crashing on me, about once every 40 minutes to an hour, and it’s driving me nuts.
I’m running a MacBook Pro w/ Intel CoreDuo 2.8 ghz, 4 gb of RAM and an NVIDIA 9600M GT w/ 512 mb.
My footage is 720p uncompressed QT. I’m doing a lot of roto and keying in my project, and very often i’ll get done tweaking a mask and right as I move an anchor point, i’ll get a spinning rainbow circle of death that won’t unfreeze until i force quit and start again. I also noticed that if i leave it frozen for a minute or so, the computer fan kicks into high gear and it sounds like the machine is getting taxed pretty seriously.
I’ve tried enabling/disabling OpenGL acceleration, but that doesn’t seem to solve the problem. I’m using a firewire 800 drive and allocating 5 gigs for disk cache. What RAM settings would you recommend that my alleviate this problem (i think i’m leaving .5 gig to other apps
Potentially related workflow question: the project I am working on is a music video, and instead of importing each clip as an individual QT, I’ve just imported the full length quicktime file I exported from FCP. Would this have any adverse effects on AE’s performance?
Thanks in advance, any advice is greatly appreciated.
-Jordan
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2 Replies
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hi jordan,
it sounds like you have the disk cache set to use the firewire drive, set it to use the main (internal/boot) drive or disable it all together.
you didn’t mention this, but you should also leave the media cache data base and cache folders on the main drive too. if you made changes to those, you can reset the preferences by quitting ae, the restart ae while holding down shift-option-command, then click ok when it asks you to reset the preference file.
with only 4gb of ram for hd projects, you might try disabling multiprocessing (preferences>memory & multiprocessing).
and i would work only with shorter clips in ae, rather than one large clip. i believe the way ae works, it will try to load the audio before previewing, so if you have a 30 min clip and just want to preview the last 10 seconds, ae will try to load the entire 30 minutes of audio before previewing.
also, you didn’t mention what codec the clip is in, but if you chose to encode as h.264, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 or any codec that uses temporal compression you will have problems in ae. try exporting that type of the footage from fcp as lossless, pro res 422, dvcprohd or photo-jpeg, ae will work much better with any of those codecs.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Have you installed the After Effects 9.0.2 update? It fixes a lot of problems, including some crashes.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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