After Effects can’t continue: abnormal condition detected

[Michael Munkittrick]

There is a high liklihood that you’re using an unstable plugin. As a test, turn off your filters and effects and try to export. If the plugin is found to the problem, the best bet is to contact the maker of that specific tool for and update.

Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA

[Rustyvoyager]

Thanks for your response. I am not using any plugins other than which comes with After Effects. Is that what you meant or some thing other. Thanks, Rusty

[Rustyvoyager]

I am sorry I wasn’t specific, I was being rushed to go somewhere and not thinking. Here is my stats: I have a Dell XPS 400 Pentium D dual core 3.00ghz, 1 gig ram, running window xp media center edition. I have AE 7.0 running from my boot disc that is 80 gig (NTFS) of which 30 are available, I have the project on an external formated fat 32 with 150 gigs of which 30 are available. I render the project to another disc with 250 gigs (NTFS) of which 55 are available. The project is a music video, 4.5 minutes long, the actual AE file is 6.4 MB, when it renders it is 9gigs, there are 430 layers(it was 575 but I just combined some footage thinking this may help). It is made up of (in order of most numerous) PNG, avi, jpeg, mp3. It is a photoshopped world with blue screen people walking around in it and the audio it just the song. I render it in 720 X 480 resolution as an avi. I do use the computer for browsing. I have Norton System Works which as anti virus, firewall, antispam and it is 100% new and updated. When I am working on the project I will usually have open photoshop, itunes, and maybe a web browser open. This usually works well except if I have a very large or too many images open in photoshop. But I have noticed that the program has been running a bit slower that it used too along with these errors i have been having. It’s funny, I was so amazed at how well AE works. I had never used it before this project and thought it was impressive how much stuff I had layered up with out ever a performance issue or crashes. Then all of a sudden error after error. I doesn’t seem to be linked to anything specific which is why I thought maybe my computer is being overwelmed rather than a corrupt file. It is specific with the one error: After Effects error: attempt to get a value from a time stream with no key values. This suddenly started occurring during edit and render at the exact frame that a certain scene started(not an embedded comp, just a group of footages(PNG, jpeg) that go on top of everything else and then go away a few seconds later..not a big deal!?!) But this scene was created like 8 monthes ago and is untouched since so the fact that is not working now is odd. And like I said in the first post, I was able to fix the problem..then it came back and then I fixed it again. OK, hopefully that was helpful to anyone who might be able to help me. Thanks again for your response.

P.S. One thing that can be said though I have no idea if it affects it… a couple days before this problem started I added a significally large number of layers. I have one piece footage,a blue screened bird flying, and I repeated it all over the last couple scenes so that in one day I added like 120 layers. But it wasn’t as though this caused it because the errors actually started when I started adding these deer running at the very end. It occured to me that the deer could be corrupt so I opened some (not all) of their pieces in photoshop and then resaved them but this didn’t help. I wonder how I know if a file is corrupt..will it open in photoshop? and will it affect other stuff that is not going on at the same point in the timeline?
So far all of the things I have tried are: I went into the secret preferences and did like someone suggested and I put 50 in the box but didn’t check any of the other boxed. Then I went back after that didn’t help and left the 50 purge but also checked Disabled layer cache. Then I went into Memory and Cache and upped the Maximum mem usage to 200 and max ram cache to 80%, then I tried closing some background programing like no itunes, no norton, no aim, etc.. Then I went in and rekeyed all thoughs birds so that they are now all one avi of birds flying rather than 120 repeats of avi. Then I went and clean out my c: and defraged it. Then today I went into the project and started reducing stuff like when a file was no longer in anymore scenes I ended it. Today was the worst though because as I was doing this it started crashing about every 20 minutes giving me that error this post is entitled. Sorry this has to be so long. This stuff is hard to explain I guess. Thanks again, Rusty

[Steve Roberts]

Hmm … thanks for the info. 🙂

-Well, MP3s are a bad idea. Use QT Pro to convert them to WAV or AIFF then re-import and delete the MP3s from the project.
-The timestream value may crop up when you use an effect that needs to source other frames in order to render each individual frame. Sometimes plugins from the Time menu do this.
-Pre-render as much as you can in precomps, or with upper layers switched off, then re-import.
-Try importing the offending project into a new project.
-Check your system monitor thing (sorry, the mac is off here) to see how your RAM usage is doing during a render.

Let us know …

[Mylenium]

Work methodically and follow the steps Steve laid out. Your project also seems to be rather heavy, so I’d first separate the comps in a sensible order and create separate projects. Getting rid of unnencessary footage elements etc. might do wonders and at least some of those separated projects are guaranteed to render flawlessly. When that’s done, sifting thru the rest and finding the problems should be much, much easier.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Rustyvoyager]

Thanks for the help. I tried prerendering only 100 layers(with the others switched off) and removing mp3s but the problem persisted and seems to be getting worse. At first(week ago or so) I was getting the errors during edit a little and it seemed like if I gave the computer a little rest then went back it would stop(the “out of memory” ones) but now it has excellerated to where I get the value time stream error upon first opening and it crashes every 20 minutes no matter what I am doing. I will continue trying the steps you’ve listed but do you think this could be a problem with my computer or the program needs to reinstalled? Last night the problems got so bad I couldn’t do anything it seemed so now I am trying to render a past version of the project to see if this one works. If doesn’t I feel like that may be a sign that I should reformat my hard drive and reinstall. If the render works that means that something I’ve added since then is the problem. What makes it hard is I haven’t hardly added anything, I’ve only placed more of the project footage into it. Unless there is some sort of tipping point that literally is an exact number of layers(in relation to there size). I thought this for a moment because one strange thing that happen a bit ago was: I was doing the usual adding layers and editing them and the rendering that piece to check my work. So you “make movie” and the render queue adds a new one to the bottom of the list. At this point I may have had a thousand of the previous renders. The program just saved them all and it didn’t seem to matter. So this time I press make movie and then the render queue would appear only it was all glitched out. I couldn’t get to the bottom of the list to find the one I just created, it kept forcing me to the middle of the list and then I tried viewing one of thoughs previous ones it wouldn’t open. Long story short, I realized that the render queue was full. literally it was like there was just no more room. I figured this out when I started deleting the old ones. Then it worked fine.
So could this be the case with adding stuff to the comp…it just gets to that tipping point but before that moment everything worked perfectly?

[Rustyvoyager]

OK…………….I definitly think that I should reinstall. Since my last post I was waiting for a render of the project from a week ago to see if this would work smoothly and it crashed about the same point in the render. Then I tried one from 3 weeks ago, crashed, then I tried one from 6 monthes ago, crashed!!!!! Should I reinstall and/or reformat my computer? Any other thoughts? Thanks again. I do so appreciate this forum. Rusty

[Rustyvoyager]

Still haven’t tried the reinstall. I was trying more prerenders with fewer and fewer layers. No work! I got a brand new type of error! “After Effects error: internal verificaion failure, sorry! {stuff not in the right sortdir}” and this crashes it.

[Rustyvoyager]

Ok, problem solved! I did need to reinstall windows. Now everything works great as it had before. I don’t know if I had a virus or what but it’s fixed. Horray! Thanks to all thoughs who lent a hand. Rusty