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After Effetcs Crashes 99% of the time — new computer
After Effects crashes nine times out of ten for me. Here are my symptoms:
-If I scrub the timeline, I crash.
-If I try to render anything longer than thirty seconds, I crash
-The error I get most of the time is something like “there was an error with effect: keylight forcing After Effects to quit”. I have also gotten this error with brightness/contrast, but 99% of the time it is keylight.
-even with the monitor at draft quality, the program hitches and lags to hell and back, and often crashes.
-If I try to load a project which contains more than, say, twenty files, it will not load the project, and will crash.
-The same happens when I try to import a Premiere Pro project into After Effects.Here are my system specs:
Intel Core 2 quad CPU x 4
Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz
2.40GHz, 3.00 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTRunning AE and APP CS3
My typical job:
I do a lot of compositing, with multiple layers, sometimes upwards of twenty different layers. I do a lot of keying–blue screen mostly–and while I used to use other keying effects, I now primarily use keylight. I render my movies in 720×480, but my source footage is a little bigger than that.I used to work with two monitors plugged into the same video card, but I am now working on one monitor to see if that was the problem, but I still have issues.
I’ve searched many troubleshooting sites and forums all over the net and have configured my machine in a way suggested on them all and I still have issues.
I tried using a mac, which worked much better and I never crashed, but the types of files I am forced to use are encoded with a codec that is not supported on a mac, so I am forced to work on my PC.
What should I do?
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18 Replies
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Alas no, I can actually get the footage from my HDV camera (.mts files) onto my Mac just fine, using iMovie. The majority of footage I use is captured on my computer using a program called Fraps, which captures very high quality, but encapsulates each .avi in its own Fraps codec, and there is no Mac compatible version of the codec.
I’ve even tried taking the Fraps .avis, using Virtual Dub to render them as uncompressed files, and yet they still do not work.
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[Brandon Dennis] “but encapsulates each .avi in its own Fraps codec, and there is no Mac compatible version of the codec.”
I’ve read that Perian will allow you to transcode FPS1 encoded video to another format on a Mac… I can’t vouch for it myself however.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Ok I did a search of the forum for fraps and it seems that I am not the only one with the fraps to mac problem. But I haven’t found anyone with my PC AE fraps problem. The way AE acts on my PC just shouldn’t be. The video quality is just fine, when the program doesn’t crash.
I suppose I could use AE on my PC to re-encode and save as lossless in QT all the individual files I use for my movies (which are hundreds, so this would be a pain) but I don’t know if there is a batch way to just import twenty clips, plop them in the timeline and export each one individually. To do so manually would just not be worth it.
As for just trying to work with AE on my PC, I key out great portions of my clips. Would AE run better if I placed a mask around a character who is shot against a blue screen so that I am leaving much less blue screen for the program to key out? Would that make a difference?
Thanks a bunch for the help all.
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instead of uncompressed, try to change it to still frames, bmp or jpeg. another thought is to change it from the codec you are using to another, by simply reencoding with a different codec. that should force the other codec out of the avi shouldnt it?
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Yes, but I haven’t found another codec in Virtual Dub that keeps my aspect ratio or file quality.
And wouldn’t rendering it as bmp or jpeg give me thousands of image files?
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yeah
sorry that suggestion for what you are dealing with, 100s of clips, just isnt practical.
if you arent on any kind of deadline i would suggest a reinstall of your computer. windows and your adobe video editing tools only. see if that installation does the same thing. additionally if you have the room to add a second hard drive installing fresh on a new hard drive would rule out both the hard drive as an issue, and windows and the video tools if a new installation worked out and doing it this way could also allow you to keep all the current installation and data.
i know this is a lot of hardware suggestions, thats kind of my background. usually for myself, if i have the time and an issue i cant seem to fix with an unistall and reinstall of my software, then i just kill the whole kit and kaboodle.
i find that sometimes there is other software that somehow manages to encroach on the installation of my video suite and causes me headaches, a good add/remove cleaning can fix things sometimes as well, especially any other video editing software.
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I have finished many, many jobs on my laptop with AE CS3 and Vista, no problem whatsoever…
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i had originally thought that this might have been a temporl compression issue on the codec, but its sounds like you had tried converting to an uncompressed avi and still had problems….
so, i’ll ask a few things…
1. is opengl disabled in ae (the preview pref)? i would disable it entirely.
2. do you have the latest ae update? 8.0.2 is available from adobe’s ae downloads page (it doesn’t seem to update trough the standard adobe updater for some reason).
3. have you tried to update keylight? there is an update to 1.2v8 at the foundry’s website (thefoundry.co.uk, i think).
4. do you have external monitoring set up in ae (like a broadcast monitor connected to firewire or a capture device like aja or decklink)? if so, disable output in the video preview preference.Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
OpenGL was disabled (it was one of my first troubleshooting steps) and I do not have an external monitoring set up. I had not, however, downloaded any patches for AE or keylight. I just downloaded both updates. I am still unable to get any of my fraps footage to work in AE or APP on my Mac, but I have not yet tried AE on my PC to see if the changes helped. I’ll find out here in a little bit when I import this project I have been working on.
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I have been having the worst time with AE CS3. I just got a new system.
MacPro 2.8Ghz 800mhz bus.
NVIDIA 8800 512mb ram.
8 gigs Ram.
10.5.2 all the updates.
AE CS 3 8.0.2Though its supposed to be multi tread optimized, it stops and pauses all the time while rendering. Freezes a lot and makes me force quit. Whenever I am doing anything too complicated it crashes right out.
My theory is that Adobe doesn’t want to make an omtimized product for MacTel because they in a product war with Apple. AKA Adobe Blows…
-Todd
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