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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects After Effects renders black!

  • After Effects renders black!

    Posted by David Franklin on June 24, 2009 at 2:50 pm

    Hi All,

    Seem to be getting an odd issue with AE CS4 when it comes to rendering. I’ve never experienced this before. It seems that if I have more than 7 compositions in a project, rendering out from any of them can produce a few little issues. This one I’ve come across twice now and I just don’t get it…

    Rendering out a composition can render some layers as black video, but some layers fine. I have a simple comp (that is going inside another comp) that is 6 layers of video, each fades in/out to the next. However only 1 layer will render out properly, the rest appear as black. It has happened before on another composition which rendered some background objects (seperate layers) as black video.

    Again as I say, I never experienced this before, having ran AE 6-CS3 before. I even tried making the layers invisible and visible again just in case there was a crazy issue there… but no. I even tried rendering out as quicktime and AVI and BMP sequences with no luck, it’s always the same.

    Anyone??? Help!

    Thanks in advance!

    Reza Khorsand-nia replied 13 years, 7 months ago 4 Members · 5 Replies
  • 5 Replies
  • Kevin Camp

    June 24, 2009 at 4:29 pm

    yep… if you are having screwy things happen in ae and all the screwy things are happening only to footage layers, then i’d look at what kind of codec was used for those footage layers… hdv, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 and h.264 are codecs that can give ae problems and should be converted to another codec like lossless animation, photo-jpeg, pro res 422, avid’s dnxhd or dvcprohd (or sd varieties of dv).

    if the footage is not the problem, try disabling multiprocessing in ae.

    if that’s not the problem, then let us know what effects are on the footage.

    Kevin Camp
    Senior Designer
    KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • David Franklin

    June 25, 2009 at 10:43 am

    Thanks for the help guys. It DOES seem that it’s a codec issue, though as I say I’ve not experienced it before. Odd that AE should display the footage but not render it out. I found that Premiere didn’t even display the image, but Photoshop had no problem reading it and re-rendering out to an uncompressed quicktime file without issue. How is it one Adobe product can read a video file and others cannot..? AND that it was Photoshop that could figure it out and their video-based programs could not! Very odd, especially as the video was rendered out of premiere in the first palce as a simple DVPAL video.

    Anyway, thanks for the tips… gonna keep my eye on this one!

  • Kevin Camp

    June 25, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    it is interesting that dv was giving you problems, it’s not usually one of those codecs that gives ae trouble…

    and i too have found that some adobe products will open a file, while another will not… however i haven’t seen that with the more recent adobe products…

    Kevin Camp
    Senior Designer
    KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • Chris Liddell

    April 12, 2012 at 6:37 pm

    I’ve just had the experience of AE cs5 & 5.5 rendering black only when attempting full 1920×1080 res output… lesser resolutions were fine.

    To find the problem, after trying everything in the cCow forums here, I set my working view res to 100% (resulting in a black render) and then switched each layer in the comp off one at a time until I got a non-black result… this enabled me to trace the problem to a SOLID lyr with the Sapphire S_Clouds effect applied

    To fix all i had to do was preCompose that layer with its effect and full-res rendering was successful once more

    hope this helps any folk who happen to fall down a similar hole, and always on deadline of course 😉

  • Reza Khorsand-nia

    December 14, 2012 at 7:13 am

    Thanks for sharing about the “plugin” issue. I substituted the “s_vignette” plugin with a different one to achieve the same effect. I had no idea that I could of just precomposed it. Thanks for the great advice and tips! Cheers!

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