• Adobe After Effects

  rendering compression errors

  Posted by Kurt Murphy on January 13, 2006 at 2:57 pm

  I’m rendering about 40 AE animations over the weekend (or at least I WANT to), but on the majority of my renders are failing with this error message:

  After Effects error: compressing frame of movie

  Steve Roberts replied 20 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Steve Roberts

  January 13, 2006 at 3:09 pm

  Hmm …

  1. Have you been checking RAM usage on your system? Do the renders fail when RAM usage gets to a certain level?
  2. Have you tried the secret prefs?
  3. If you have QT 7.0.3, can you downgrade to 7.0.1 or 6.5? (links have been posted here)

  Let us know …
  Steve
• 

  Kurt Murphy

  January 13, 2006 at 10:22 pm

  <<1. Have you been checking RAM usage on your system? Do the renders fail when RAM usage gets to a certain level?>>

  At about 40% used on one….. Don’t know the others. I get the ‘Baaa’ then the error.

  <<2. Have you tried the secret prefs?>>

  No, what will this do?

  <<3. If you have QT 7.0.3, can you downgrade to 7.0.1 or 6.5? (links have been posted here)>>

  Running 6.5.2

  thanks,

  kurt
• 

  Steve Roberts

  January 14, 2006 at 3:51 am

  1. Sometimes renders fail when the RAM usage gets to the point where the computer starts to use a bad RAM stick. If your render fails at the same RAM usage level, you may have a bad RAM stick.

  2. To find the Secret Prefs, hold down shift when accessing AE’s prefs — keep the shift key down until you see the prefs dialog box. Try setting it to purge every 5 frames during Make Movie.

  HTH,
  Steve
• 

  Kurt Murphy

  January 16, 2006 at 9:24 pm

  Steve,

  I came back on Saturday and 6 of the 17 renders had failed. I did the Secret Prefs thing.. AND IT WORKED! You saved my life… Or at least 6 renders. Thank you.

  Does this mean I have bad RAM? Does it also mean the RAM purges so that it’s only using about 10-20% of it?

  thanks,

  kurt murphy
• 

  Steve Roberts

  January 16, 2006 at 9:46 pm

  [kurt murphy] “Does this mean I have bad RAM?”

  Maybe. In my experience, if things crash when RAM usage reaches a certain point, some of the RAM may be bad. It may also be that your comp uses more RAM than you think. At any rate, not being much of a gearhead, this is the limit of my usefulness. 🙂

  [kurt murphy] “Does it also mean the RAM purges so that it’s only using about 10-20% of it?”

  Use your system’s tools to see how your RAM is being used during a render. I can’t remember your platform, but OSX and XP both have system tools for that sort of thing. The secret prefs doesn’t purge based on usage, it purges based on frame number (every 5 or whatever). If you want to cache more frames in RAM (thus using more RAM), increase the “every X frames” number.

  Hope that helps,
  Steve

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