8 core crashing at end of any and all renders

[Kevin Camp]

it would help to know a little about your system (os version, ram) and what version of ae. also, just to be sure, you aren’t running quicktime 7.4.0… there were a lot of problems with that version of quicktime.

you could try moving the folder that contains the ae pref file to the desktop. then open ae and render any previous comp to see if ae crashes. this will at least rule out any corrupt pref or bad settings.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Benjamin Thompson]

I had a similar issue not too long ago. I’m on an 8 core power mac. Every time my machine would crash on the very last frame of my renders. A temporary solution for me was to turn off multiprocessing. This helped me complete my renders until our engineers were able to fix the problem (it turned out to be a network issue with my account). This was my situation…it may or may not help you. But like kevin said, check your version of quicktime and move your prefs file to rule out any bad settings.

Ben Thompson
Motion Graphics
BYU Broadcasting

[Kevin Camp]

[Benjamin Thompson] “it turned out to be a network issue with my account”

interesting.. i was a little suspicious of a permissions problem, which sounds similar to what you were experiencing. almost more interesting is that turning off multiprocessing helped with a network/account issue.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Tony Spark]

Sorry about that. It’s a 2008 8 core with 8 gigs of ram running Leopard with QT 7.4.5.

[Tony Spark]

Thanks for getting back. I’ve turned on and off everything and in various versions. The weird part is that it finishes the render and then crashes saving a _1 version of the file. This file could be 1 sec long or 3 minutes long, it doesn’t matter. It smells like a incompatibility between all the elements (computer, system, and AE) but I can’t figure it out.

[Tony Spark]

Let me try disabling the network and see if it crashes. Pretty soon I’ll have to put a pyramid over the studio and start the chanting again. Computers can’t live with them and ….

[Tony Spark]

I figured it out, although I doubt that Adobe will cop to it. My audio interface is an old MOTU box called an 828. New drivers, etc. (Audio in AE by the way is set to internal speakers.) Leave the Motu box plugged in, crash. Unplug the fire wire, or turn off the box and no crash. I haven’t checked with Adobe but I will bet that the screams of denial will be loud. If I can get them to even say hello.
Meanwhile the MOTU box works with everything else just fine, and since we do a fair amount of audio post it’s important. Works with FCP, works with Logic and Soundtrack, works with the computer sounds, etc etc.
It’s probably in the “media core” whatever that little hidden bundle really is.
MOTU claims they have never heard of this. And my five will get you ten that Adobe is to blame, somehow. So now the fix is to turn off the 828 when I render. Not too painful but really silly. Somewhere out there some poor schmoe like me is going to have to unplug every totally “unrelated” device to discover this. Maybe they can find this post and avoid the pain.
“One step forward…..”
Thanks to everybody for taking a stab at this.

[Tony Spark]

Weird is as weird does. I tried other settings, and I hardly ever render with audio. I usually just have the audio there for reference. AE really does audio badly. You would think after all this time, but noooo.

As to the crashes, this just reeks of the media core thing. Apple supports it badly and with the new computer and Leopard it just seems that there is something not right. We even have trouble playing h264 files with that new leopard interface, which is cool when it works (ie spacebar from the finder). But our 3d stuff just flies, and for the most part AE behaves. It’s just stuff like this that pops up and, against all logic, refuses to work correctly.

I sent Adobe a note but I haven’t been impressed with their response to stuff like this. I’m kind of wondering why other users of MOTU interfaces haven’t had this problem since according to them it’s the same set of drivers for most of their stuff.

[Adam Taylor]

interesting…i’m using CS3 with QT 7.4.5 on a Quad G5 and 10.4.11 – and i’m seeing a very similar problem. I can render and length of sequence, but AE hangs on the final frame and needs to be Force Quit.

I am trying to render out a small 2 sec logo which is made up purely from photoshop layers, no audio at all. I’m rendering it as lossless with alpha at 25fps sd pal resolution.

The weird thing is that whilst i don’t have a Motu 828 connected ( i do have Digidesign 002R and Motu Digital Timepiece), and i’m not using audio on this sequence. When i checked Activity Monitor after the last freeze, one of the process that was not responding was the CoreAudio !!

Time for some more tests i think….

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

[Tony Spark]

I’m not sure that this is a direct connection but…. When I boot the activity monitor I see that the core audio is in red and “not responding”. Since the core audio is, I believe, unique to Pro Tools and since they only yesterday started to support Leopard maybe the problem is somewhere in there. I’ve never been very impressed with PT’s support of Apple audio.
In the meantime, the only solution for me seems to be to turn off my MOTU box to solve the rendering problem. Seems crazy but after talking to all the players and listening to their denials it seems that it will be a while before this gets resolved.