after effects error: adding to movie (-1309)

[Steve Roberts]

Standard AE troubleshooting to narrow down the cause:

– open whatever your OS uses to check RAM usage
– hide layers that use effects and try to render
– disable some effects and try to render
– make sure you have enough drive space
– check to see if you are rendering a file bigger than 4GB to a FAT-formatted drive. If so, segment your files at less than 4GB in preferences/output.

Let us know …

[Sarah Adina smith]

thanks so much! I’ll try all these things and let you know!

[Sarah Adina smith]

Yay!

exporting the composition in short segments worked like a charm.

many, many thanks

[Steve Roberts]

Must have been the FAT thing. Was your drive formatted to FAT? (R-click, properties)

[Sarah Adina smith]

yes, it was. format: MS-DOS File System (FAT32)

I assume there’s no way to reformat it without losing all the info?

[Steve Roberts]

[FOAF_sas] “I assume there’s no way to reformat it without losing all the info?”

Your assumption is correct.

You’d have to move everything off the drive, re-format it to NTFS, then move everything back onto the drive.

If you work with Macs though, the Macs won’t be able to write to the NTFS drive. So there’s a trade-off with FAT32: nothing over 4GB, but Macs can write to it. Just a thought.

[Sarah Adina smith]

hmmm . . . well, I work on a mac, so that’s not an option. I don’t mind segmenting where needed for my After Effects renders, but I wonder if Final Cut Pro will have the same problem when I try to execute my final uncompressed export . . . When that time comes I guess I could always export to another hard drive . . .

Live and learn : )

[Steve Roberts]

So you’re a Mac that works with Windows, yes? You couldn’t format to HFS/HFS plus?

Yes, the 4GB limit is app-ignorant: it’s a limit of FAT, not the app. So FCP will give you a similar error, unless you’ve set it to auto-segment, which may or may not be possible with FCP. Never tried it.

[Sarah Adina smith]

hmm . . . okay. well I think it will be easier for me to do my final export to a different hard drive than to try reformatting at this point. (Its a terabyte and has a ton of info on it)

I’m sure there are applications I could get that would let me run windows on my mac, but I think it might be too complicated for me to try right now. I’m going to stick to your brilliant segmenting technique and then when it comes to FCP, I’ll just daisy-chain hard drives and export to a non-FAT . . .

I knew this hard drive was too good of a deal to be true. $320 for a terabyte . . . live and learn.

Have a great night! I’ll post a link to the project when its done in a month or so!

[Steve Roberts]

Well, it’s not a bad deal. FAT makes sense to cover all (both) the bases … it’ll work out of the box for either OS. But if you want a better drive for Windows, you go NTFS, better for Mac, go HFS.

G’night!