After Effects error: unable to allocate space for a 1440 x 1080 image buffer.

[Peter Van der zee]

Try edit-purge-all once in a while

vanderzee.tv

[Manuel Rodrigues]

Jep,

I Know that works during the working progres but the same error occours while im rendering a full movie. Its very frustrating to see that your render has canceled itself after 5 minutes while you expected it to work on it the whole night… And it seems to occour more frequently whilst im working on the same project for a few hours. Then I log out to clean all the memory and things seem fine for a while… But they are not!

groet,

Manuel Rodrigues

[Kevin Camp]

there is also the secret preference…

hold the shift key when selecting preferences in ae, select any preference, like general, to bring up the pref window. then click the preference pulldown and at the bottom there should be one called secret.

select that one, and you can enter a setting to force ae to purge frames at regular intervals… if your render is crashing after, say 60 frames, set the purge for every 50 frames. this will usually slow a render down a little bit, but it may allow the render to finish rendering.

also, what are your memory and cache settings… you have enough ram for your 4 cores that the defaults should work pretty well.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Manuel Rodrigues]

This is a workaround. But thank you for the insight 🙂 As is is quite cool 🙂

I must refer to my first my message:

AE says this once every 15 minutes and f*** up my renders.

After Effects error: Unable to allocate space for a
1440 x 1080 image buffer.
You may be expirencing fragmentation. In the
Memory and cache Preference dialog box, try
decreasing the maximum RAM cache size value
and selecting the Enable Disk Cache option,
increasing Maximum Memory Usage, or both.

What do I do to fix this?

Please! Help me!

[Kevin Camp]

well the first thing i would do is set the memory and cache settings back to the defaults (max memory: 120%, max cache: 60%), and maybe enable the disk cache for the default setting (2000mb).

if you have multiprocessing enabled, this should allow all 4 cores (ae says ‘3 additional cores’). each core will have 1.5gb of ram to work with. this should allow 2gb of ram for image buffer and any system operations, in addition to the 2000mb of disk cache (if you enabled it). purge all, then render.

if you still have problems, decrease the ram cache to, maybe, 33%. this will give you 1gb per core and free up 4gb for image buffer. purge all then render.

if you still have problems, i would shut down for a few minutes, then reboot and see if you still have issues, some times computers just need a little rest to clear things out.

you may find that for some comps to render you’ll have to use the secret pref to regularly purge frames.

other things you can try, would be to run the disk utility (applications>utilities>disk utility) repair permissions on the startup drive and verify it too. if it needs repair, you’ll need to boot from the osx install dvd and runn the disk utility from there.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Multipasser]

This is the most ennoying thing in AE. I still do not understand why Adobe hasnt fixed this! Grrrr.

Are you using MotionTile effect on an image? sometimes it makes an image to big internally and crashes. It helps to reduce it or maybe Render out the motiontile effect to an image.

[Laura Hewett]

I know this reply is probably a tad late, but for anyone else having this problem:

Try changing the output destination for your render.

I was having the same error message popping up when trying to render something to the same hard drive the project was saved to. So I tried saving it to the Desktop instead and it worked fine.

I assume this is down to my hard drive, but it isn’t causing me any other problems at the moment so I simply keep a folder on the Desktop called Renders and keep making sure everything is backed up as it should be!

[Dave Stalion]

I was having the same problem as described until I changed the destination drive and whalla!
It worked!
Thank you so much. You saved me hours of headache.
Creative Cow ROCKS!
Dave

Dave Stalion
Agricultural Communications
University of Kentucky

[Carmen King]

I struggled with this and tried all the tips above.

Eventually my boss came with a fresh pair of eyes. All we did was see at what point this error came up, deleted the layers that started there (in my case it was quite easy only text), recreated the text, and voila. It works.

hope this helps someone

[Ryan Lelcka]

I spent about six hours trying to figure on this same problem. Absolutely nothing worked. Then I realized I had a layer with a huge dimension – like 10,000 x 8,000 (I am working in 3d and I didn’t want the edge of the layer to trail off in the frame). I made that layer smaller and it fixed the problem.