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After Effects refuses to render my movie.
First off, my system specs are a Macbook Pro 2.4Ghz with 4GB of ram and I’m using After Effects CS3. The footage I’m working with is D1 720×486.
I am trying to render out a 2.5 minute movie but no matter what I try, I get the “After Effects: Not enough memory to create shadow map vertices.” message (the render fails on the same frame every time). I don’t think I’ve got that much going on, there’s 3 precomps in total but I’m only trying to render out one of them. The one I’m trying to render out is made up of a total of 9 layers (3 lights and 6 3D layers but one is just a solid background).
I’ve purged the cache, tried the “secret” purge every [x] frames setting (using everything from 1-15 frames), disabled layer cache, changed the Shadow Map resolution to 500, and I still get the same problem every time. The only success I’ve had is when I checked “Use OpenGL Renderer” in Render Settings, but the resulting video is pixelated and of significantly lower quality.
Does anyone have any additional suggestions? I’ve been trying to fix this all day and haven’t gotten anywhere with it.
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3 Replies
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You might be able to try pre-composing some of the layers and saving them as a proxy with the best render and output settings. Then with the nested proxy, render your composition with the use “all proxies” selected in your render settings. If you can isolate what’s failing and get it rendered, you might be successful.
-J
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“After Effects refuses to render my movie.”
Did you remember to say “please”?Seriously though, I’ve run into a similar problem of renders failing on the same frame every time and, for me, it has usually come from a conflict amongst third-party plugins or even native AE filters … some effects conflict with others and the problem can usually be fixed by changing the order the plugins are applied in. To isolate the problem, you might try turning off effects on that layer one at a time and rendering test movies until you identify the culprit.
Even if it isn’t a plugin issue, there is probably something unique about that frame that AE isn’t liking so you might focus your attention on what is going on within that frame. And, it probably has nothing to do with memory … AE just seems to like generic error messages that all refer to memory.
Also, a great source for AE error info is the website of AE guru Mylenium … https://voir.mylenium.de/
He also frequents the Adobe forums so you might post your question there as well, although their forums are not nearly as user-friendly as the almighty COW. -
Try precomposing just your layer with the shadow vertices. Next, open up that precomp and go to Composition>>Pre-Render. If you’ve never pre-rendered before, what it does is render out the comp you’ve selected and then AE puts the resulting .mov in the place where the comp was originally. In this case, since you’re precomposing the layer with the shadow vertices and pre-rendering it, essentially you’re just rendering out that layer. I can’t guarantee this will work, but I’ve had success in similar situations to what you’re having.
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