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Random Error
Hi, new to the community here hopefully I can contribute at some stage in the future although I am a long way from that.
I have started playing around with adobe after effects and have exported a couple different animated videos with no issues.
Recently I put some time in and produced another animation with many more moving parts.
I received the below error message. I have googled the code with no luck and spent the day trying to solve this problem myself. I just can’t solve the issue and really need some help at this stage.
Any help or advice is very much appreciated in advanced.
Here is the error log.
– Encoding Time: 00:00:22
07/17/2018 04:29:37 PM : Encoding Failed
————————————————————
Export Error
Error compiling movie.Render Error
Render returned error.
Writing with exporter: H.264
Writing to file: \\?\C:\Users\Jack\Desktop\video.mp4
Writing file type: H264
Around timecode: 00;00;00;08
Rendering at offset: 0.000 seconds
Component: H.264 of type Exporter
Selector: 9
Error code: -1609629695————————————————————
– Encoding Time: 00:00:18
07/17/2018 04:38:10 PM : Encoding Failed
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Export Error
Error compiling movie.Render Error
Render returned error.
Writing with exporter: H.264
Writing to file: \\?\C:\Users\Jack\Desktop\video.mp4
Writing file type: H264
Around timecode: 00;00;00;08
Rendering at offset: 0.000 seconds
Component: H.264 of type Exporter
Selector: 9
Error code: -1609629695————————————————————
– Encoding Time: 00:00:18
07/17/2018 04:44:41 PM : Encoding Failed
————————————————————
Export Error
Error compiling movie.Render Error
Render returned error.
Writing with exporter: H.264
Writing to file: \\?\C:\Users\Jack\Desktop\Comp 1.mp4
Writing file type: H264
Around timecode: 00;00;00;08
Rendering at offset: 0.000 seconds
Component: H.264 of type Exporter
Selector: 9 -
3 Replies
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With render errors it can be a number of factors- sometimes there is a corrupt file or layer within the project causing issues. Others there is simply too much for AE to do and it crashes the render.
One quick thing to try – try changing your render to a quicktime Mov rather than mp4, and if successful, you can encode your mov to mp4 using media encoder. It may be that rendering and encoding to mp4 all in one render is causing problems.
The safest way to ensure the render would be to render to a sequence. I use PNG sequences often, make sure they are saved in a subfolder so that your render folder doesn’t fill up with hundreds of files. The advantage of sequences is that even if a render crashes, the frames rendered up until that point are reusable, unlike a mov or mp4 render.
If there is a still an error, you can now restart the sequence from where it stopped. You can then try again. If your render still cannot get past a troublesome frame, you know the issue is around that frame.
So – if it does get past the frame, and finishes the sequence, you can bring that into media encoder or even after effects again and render out in the format you prefer. (Ensure you make sure that you interpret the sequence frame rate correctly, it may default to 30 or something you don’t want).
However – if there is a problem, try to look at layers that start at that troublesome frame, or effects that happen around then. It could be an extreme amount of depth of field, plus a ton of particles from a third-party plug in, or could just be a simple bug from an effect that has known issues.
Its a bit like detective work, slowly eliminate the red herrings until you find the culprit! Then there will be other options – look online for known issues, or sometimes it is worth breaking up a render, for example rendering the background layers of an animation first, then adding in extra passes of effects and grading for example. Sometimes it will require a few passes to get it out.
It’s worth doing though as this practise can in fact help you avoid 20 hour renders by breaking them up and allowing after effects to not get overwhelmed by the amount of calculations it has to do to create each frame, and is particularly worth knowing when working with heavy vfx projects at high resolutions.
Hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions and I’ll get back asap,
Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK -
Thanks so much David!
Awesome information and lots for me to go over an re google as this is all new to me. I appreciate the time you have taken to reply! Legend!
Thanks
Jack -
I’m not a fan of encoding from AE (and if I read the error wrong I’ll get to the opposite below). AE is a compositor, not an encoder: its best to send the output to something like Media Encoder. Not only will this help eliminate the problem but you get a better encode too. AE cannot (TTBOMK) do a 2 pass encode because once it renders one frame and lays it down it can’t go back and look at that frame. The best encoders run down the length of the movie and analyze the footage and then use elements (color, movement) from the whole movie to inform each frame’s compress on the second pass.
As AE opens and closes the file it writes to it can run into the same kinds of errors described below that also affect using footage that is compressed as your source. So when it opens the file to write another frame, it attaches that frame to the frame before that isn’t really there, or worse it has to write a frame that the codec would prefer didn’t really exist, or it renders a non keyframe frame where the codec wants a keyframe.Codecs like H264 and wrappers like Mp4s have what amounts to ghost frames between real frames. (this is massively oversimplified). These ghost frames get their data from the frames around them on playback – it keeps the files small because of the original frames, perhaps only 2/3 are represented in the file and the ghost frames are made up on the fly during playback. But AE steps through each frame in a file when it uses that file as a source so when it comes upon a frame that isn’t really there, it can freak out. Not all codecs are like this. In fact, most footage these days (sadly) is compressed in some way and many work just fine as source for AE, so it’s not an across the board problem.
Even if what’s I’ve written above isn’t the problem, I’ll bet rendering out to another uncompressed format (or as David suggests, to stills) and then encoding in an external encoder should solve it.
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