AE Memory Problems

[Walter Soyka]

How much RAM do you have in your machine?

If multi-processing is on, try turning it off.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jordan Montreuil]

Well the machine has 6 gigs of RAM but I had to go for the 32 bit version of Windows 7 because the 64 bit wasn’t working with our Blackmagic Capture Card. That’s a whole other story, don’t get me started on that.

As for multi-processing, that was the first thing I turned off. I noticed my problem always occured at frame 60 but I still can’t figure out what layer is causing it. All of my layers have already started so its not something new introduced into the scene. I just don’t know.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jordan Montreuil] “As for multi-processing, that was the first thing I turned off. I noticed my problem always occured at frame 60 but I still can’t figure out what layer is causing it. All of my layers have already started so its not something new introduced into the scene. I just don’t know.”

A couple thoughts:

Can you save frame 60 as a file? (Composition > Save frame as > File…)

Try rendering using “Multi-machine Settings” for your Render Settings and any image sequence for your output module (“Multi-machine Sequence” will do). This will allow you to pick up your render where it left off if AE crashes.

You can also try setting the purge option in the secret menu — start around 30 frames and work your way down. Please remember to set this back once you’re finished rendering your project, as it will have a negative impact on rendering speed for projects that do render normally.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jordan Montreuil]

I rendered out an image sequence and was able to complete it after it failed and I picked it back up where it left off.

I found my problem though. I am working with some HD footage and when I turn off the layers, it renders just fine. I have the layers scaled way down. Is it possible to get AE to interpret or sample the footage at a lower resolution? I could render out the clips at a smaller resolution but well, I don’t want to.

[Jordan Montreuil]

I just discovered proxies. Going to try and proxy my clips and see what happens.

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “…if you only have one machine, it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush. Can you explain what’s going on when you use it?”

Sure — when you’re outputting an image sequence, there’s an option in the Render Settings to skip existing files. AE’s multi-machine renderer is somewhat naive; the render nodes don’t communicate with a manager or with each other; they look on shared storage for frames that don’t exist yet.

By default, all machines will begin with frame 0. The first one to hit the storage and see that Comp 1_00000.psd doesn’t exist will create that file on the shared storage to “claim” it, and then begin rendering the frame. When the other render nodes see frame 0 already exists, they will skip it and start looking for Comp 1_00001.psd. Each machine (really each instance in a multi-processing/multi-machine setup) continues this look-claim-render-save-look again process until the entire sequence is complete.

So how does this relate to a single-machine working? When you use the Multi-machine render settings and output modules, you’ll get a PSD sequence and “Skip existing frames” is checked by default.

If your render crashes and AE loses track of where it was, you can just add your comp back to the render queue and go; it will start at the beginning and skip everything it’s already rendered until it reaches a frame it hasn’t rendered yet.

There’s no need to use Multi-machine settings; you could manually check “Skip existing files” in the render settings for any image sequence-based output module — but since the settings are all already there straight out of the box, I prefer to use them.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jordan Montreuil]

Wow, Walter. You just blew my mind. Thanks a bunch. That will be really helpful in the future.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jordan Montreuil] “Going to try and proxy my clips and see what happens.”

Two things: First, proxies will not include audio by default, so if you need it, you should manually add it to the Output Module when you render the proxy. Second, don’t forget to change the “Proxy Use” settings to “Use All Proxies” in your Render Settings on the final comp.

I’ve missed both of those so many times myself that I created templates specifically for use with proxies.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Jordan Montreuil] “Wow, Walter. You just blew my mind. Thanks a bunch. That will be really helpful in the future.”

Thanks for the kind words, and I hope you do find it helpful! I work with extremely large comp sizes for my hi-res widescreen events clients, so even with 32 GB of RAM, I’ve had to learn a lot about both tuning my workflow and AE’s performance settings the hard way.

I just can’t wait until AE CS5 brings us 64-bit goodness and eliminates these problems caused by 32-bit RAM limitations…

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jordan Montreuil]

Good advice. Thanks.