• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Can I pass the “Timeout while waiting for the engine” error?!

  Posted by Mehdi Rafeie on September 20, 2013 at 6:25 pm

  Hi

  I have a very very complicated project and need to handle my tasks by means of expressions. Everything was going on slowly until I got the ‘Timeout while waiting for the engine’ message that stopped my work 🙁

  I’m pretty sure that my expressions have no infinite loop nor any stack-over-flow bug. They’re just heavy to be performed fast. The expression which is applied to transform.position can only affect on 11 layers of the comp and the rest of comp layers (which are more than 50 layers) announce the ‘timeout’ warning message and disable the expression.

  I tested it on another PC with 8 CPU cores and 16-GB RAM. The result was better. It could apply the expression on 16 layers but encountered with the same warning message.

  Is there any way to disable timeout detection or increase its interval?

  Thanks in advance

  Dan Ebberts replied 12 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  September 20, 2013 at 10:33 pm

  I don’t think there’s any way to disable the engine timeout error.

  Is your composition long? Do you have any expressions that go through entire comp frame-by-frame? Do you have a bunch of cascading expressions (where the result of one expression depends on the result of a similar expression on another layer)? Any of those could cause problems for you.

  Dan
• 

  Mehdi Rafeie

  September 21, 2013 at 8:44 am

  Thanks a lot Dan!

  Q: Is your composition long?
  A: In some cases, yes.

  Q: Do you have any expressions that go through entire comp frame-by-frame?
  A: Yeah, but I temporarily forced my comps to have a length of 1 frame only.

  Q: Do you have a bunch of cascading expressions?
  A: Yes, although the expressions are time-independent but they are depend on each other.

  Regarding the tips you mentioned, I removed all unnecessary dependencies and fortunately solved the timeout error. Nonetheless, as the project is too huge and it’s possible to hook me again, is there any way to increase the allowable expressions run-time to escape the timeout trap?

  Thank you very much again!
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  September 21, 2013 at 4:35 pm

  >is there any way to increase the allowable expressions run-time to escape the timeout trap?

  Not to my knowledge.

  Dan

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