32gb can’t render 4k?

[Ericbowen]

No AE flushed the ram automatically when the ram usage reached a certain level close to the max ram.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[David Cabestany]

Ok, so here’s what’s happened today. Todd, I’m really hopping you can chime in on this, I’m completely puzzled.

I prerendered a bunch of layers and then I soloed to prerender them again as a single element.

As I started this second render everything worked fine with MP on and then my display went to sleep. I clicked a single key to wake it up and then the rendered was stopped with the following warning:

“After Effects warning: A frame failed to render while using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously. Allocating more memory to the background processes in Memory & Multiprocessing Preferences may fix this problem. (26 :: 142)”

So I started it again with MP off, and it started fine, it said it would take around 45 minutes. Then again, 13 minutes in the screen went to sleep again (just the screen, I have the hard drive set up to never go to sleep) and when I woke it up the render had failed again. Except this time the queue says: User stopped and no error is being generated.

I tried to start the render again both with MP on and off and it’s not working again. The only way to make it work is to send it again to the render queue all over again from scratch.

I changed my screen to not go to sleep now, but this is definitely a first, I’ve never seen the screen going to sleep affecting my renders, in fact most nights I set up nigh long renders and put the display to sleep myself.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
D.

[Jeff Kay]

What is the final render from AE set to output as?

You should be able to render as a png sequence which will give you partial renders that should be relatively easy to combine or continue from the error. Its certainly not the most desirable option, but it should be a viable, though potentially time consuming, workaround. Then take that png sequence and encode it to whatever format you are using/delivering (its going to be pretty big, a quick estimate would put a 4min 4K video at around 240GB).

Alternatively if you can pre-render whatever pre-comps/layers/elements and then replace those elements with rendered footage, then AE will only have to deal with a video stream rather than a collection of elements that has multiple effects placed upon them.

[Walter Soyka]

Are you running Mavericks? Does it help if you disable Apple’s new App Nap feature for After Effects?

(Select the app in Finder, Cmd+I for Get Info, make sure “Prevent App Nap” is checked.)

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeff Kay] “You should be able to render as a png sequence”

I don’t usually recommend PNG sequences — they are relatively slow to compress. PSD, TIFF, or TGA might be faster choices.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[David Cabestany]

Jeff, yes, I started rendering to an image sequence, tiffs, but the render would stop every few frames and takes a long time, also it would drop random frames, so in the end became a highly unpractical solution, as I had to be standing next to the machine the whole time, ready to restart the render, and sometimes quit and restart the program.

Walter, I’m running Mavericks, I wasn’t aware of the App nap feature, I’ll check it out right now. Although this problem never happened to me before, then again, I never had such complex project in this machine.

I moved all my footage to a thunderbolt drive, I was bringing everything from the server before, through a
gigabit network, I’ll see if that makes any difference.

Thanks a lot again.

[David Cabestany]

So I moved everything to a thunderbolt drive and finally was able to partially render.
I had to turn off MP and enable the secret prefs to purge the layer cache every 1 frame.

Then I soloed a bunch of layers to flatten them into one single layer and replace the other ones but I can only render a certain amount of frames, then it stops (no error generated) and the queue says: Will continue from and a frame number. So I close my bracket to the next frame after I stopped and continue, but it stops again several times over, each time being able to render less and less frames until it can’t render anything. The problem is when I look at my ram usage it’s only between 5 and 37% out of 32 gb and like I mentioned I’m purging the cache every frame.

Can anyone suggest a course of action after this modification I made to my setup?

Thanks.

[Ericbowen]

Where are you viewing your ram usage?

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[David Cabestany]

At the bottom of the render queue, it says 5% (or whatever) of 32gb used.

[Todd Kopriva]

> At the bottom of the render queue, it says 5% (or whatever) of 32gb used.

That is not a very useful number, since it only represents RAM used by one part of After Effects (the foreground application). This does not include background rendering processes, external analysis processes, memory requested by third-party importers, etc.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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