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Image Buffer issue – deadline please help
I know…I know… It’s all over the forums. I’m doing earth zooms for a 10 part series and am halfway through, but these image buffer errors are killing me!
It happens regardless of the project. I’m using techniques that cut up the images to keep them small and parent them to a null. It’s definitely an image buffer issue because it happens right when my large file size hits.
Here an example of the error I’m getting this evening:
I’ve read this https://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not.asp and tried some of the suggestions but I’m still having problems.
I’m on AE CS4.
Here are some settings:
I’ve toyed with this one with lots of combinations but still come up short: What’s a good recipe for my situation?
My secret preference is purging every 10 frames now.
I have no footage in my comp. The comp is HDTV 1080 at 29.97 rendering to an animation codec QT all on local drives.
Any ideas at all would be most helpful. I’ve tried keeping my file sizes down, but feel there has got to be a way to push this to render at this size. I have months of rendering ahead of me and really want to kick this image buffer issue.
Thanks in advance,
Michael -
11 Replies
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Why would you be using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously when you’re running out of memory trying to render a single frame?
Turn Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously off. Only when you’ve got plenty of resources to render a single frame should you even consider dividing up your resources to try to render more than one frame at a time.
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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Thanks for the quick reply. I should have mentioned that the exact error happens with multiprocessing turned off.
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You are encountering the limitations of a 32-bit application which uses layer based compositing. You either have to reduce your images to an even smaller resolution, or use a node based compositor, or wait until Adobe finally releases a 64-bit version of AE, which unfortunately I heard won’t be happening for CS5. I hope I heard wrong.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
> …which unfortunately I heard won’t be happening for CS5. I hope I heard wrong.
Anyone who knows wouldn’t be saying, so I can guarantee that anyone who told you this doesn’t know.
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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
[Todd Kopriva] “Anyone who knows wouldn’t be saying, so I can guarantee that anyone who told you this doesn’t know.”
It was from someone who has been doing beta testing of previous versions. But the fact you are disputing it, gives me hope. I don’t really care if they were wrong, all I want is 64 bit support.
I’m sure there are all kinds of NDA’s, so I respect the fact that you cannot disclose this information.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
The size of your layer all by itself is not too great; it’s big, but it’s well within the limits of what can fit into the RAM that After Effects has available. Here’s a partial list of factors that cause the image buffer to be greater for an image of a given size:
– higher color depth (16 bpc or 32 bpc)
– glow and blur effects
– 3D shadows
– color management
– blending modes and layer styles
– applying pulldown
– depth-of-field effects
– temporal effectsyou can selectively tweak these factors and see if that allows the troublesome frame(s) to render.
Basically, the issue comes down to how much After Effects has to hold in memory to render a single frame. If it has to hold multiple frames in memory at once (as can happen for blending modes and temporal effects), or if the rendering has to consider pixels outside of the edge of the layer (as with glow effects, etc.), then the amount of memory required is greater. (more here)
The limit is a few GB, which is why a 30,000×30,000 32-bpc image with nothing added still bumps against the limit. John is right that this limit is imposed by the 32-bitness of the After Effects CS4 application.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
That large image actually is a comp, so I set a proxy PNG file and tweaked some more settings. It now renders at the same size! Thanks for all of your help. I’m still curious why I get this error so much. I notice it crashes when these large comps and images are being scaled up to a huge amount due to their null parent.
Should I leave multiprocessing off given my issue?
Michael
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I’m glad that you got it to work. If your problematic composition contains nested compositions, then you might want to look into pre-rendering. You mentioned that you’re using a proxy; so this would be just another step in that direction.
> Should I leave multiprocessing off given my issue?
The general answer to that question is that there’s no harm in trying to use this option, but don’t hesitate to turn it off, especially for memory-intensive compositions. It helps in many but not all cases.
Here’s a summary from After Effects Help:
“Using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature does not speed up the rendering of all compositions. The rendering of some compositions is memory-intensive, such as when you are working with very large background plates that are several thousands of pixels tall and wide. The rendering of some compositions is bandwidth-intensive (I/O-intensive), such as when you are working with many source files, especially if they are not served by a fast, local, dedicated disk drive. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature works best at improving performance when the resource that is most exercised by the composition is CPU processing power, such as when applying a processor-intensive effect like a glow or blur.”
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Not really looking for compassion. Prerendering only helps if it’s a comp that’s causing the problem, the large images are just images so there’s still a problem there.
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Hi
This Image Buffer Error issue is an absolute nightmare.
I got my head round it with CS3 on Mac OSX Leopard and managed to tweak all the settings in the prefs to make it work without falling over all the time.
Just upgraded to CS4 and “LO” Adobe in their infinite wisdom have decided to change the preferences.
So I can no longer adjust the settings I had to change in CS3 in order to make it work.
So now – all my projects that used to work perfectly in CS3 – wont render – or preview at full res – at all in CS4.
Apart from returning to CS3 – which is not an option now as I de-activated and sold the software – does anyone know how to get round this issue??
Thanks
Casey
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