After Effetcs Crashes 99% of the time — new computer

[Kevin Camp]

unfortunately i can’t help on the fraps issue… as others have mentioned, if the codec uses temporal (or interframe) compression, ae will struggle with it. temporal compression is common with hd codecs (like hdv, dvcprohd), so it wouldn’t surprise me if the fraps codec may be causing issues.

if you can, try converting it to a codec that does not use temporal compression. lossless animation, uncompressed or even photojpeg are good codecs that work well in ae and do not use temporal compression. and, as mentioned, image sequences will also avoid temporal compression.

try any of those and see if the software updates help your crashing issue on either platform. note, i have used dvcprohd footage in ae (v7) with keylight (v1.1) and did not have any problems with crashes, but it did bog ae down quite a bit… so i can’t say it is the codec, but at least we can rule the fraps codec out as a problem.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Brandon Dennis]

Thanks for all the advice folks, but nope, nothing has worked yet. Just tried using AE for a scene I assembled in Premiere. I imported the premiere project (about three minutes long, one hundred or so layers) and thankfully AE didn’t crash. However, it has crashed multiple times since then and I have received such messages as “AE crashed while rendering Keylight” or “while rendering curves” or “while rendering brightness/contrast”.

In order to use AE, I cannot scrub the timeline. I use keylight on all the layers in one camera shot, collor correct them and add any other effects, hit caps-lock, pre-compose them, render them, import the lossless file, place it above those layers, and then shut off those layers. It is the only way I ca get any work done.

[Marie Michelle]

Just in case you have not already resolved this issue, I thought I would mention that I had a similar situation when I first started using After Effects. After much frustration and investigation, it was finally established that it WAS the OpenGL and that it was insufficient to simply disable it in the Preferences. The Adobe guy told me to take the plug-in out of the Adobe folder and put it on my desktop or some other harmless but trackable location. This completely resolved all my crashing issues. The OpenGL problem is allegedly caused by the video card driver, but updating mine never resolved it. Removing it did.

[Brandon Dennis]

Oh wow thank you, yes I am still having crashing problems even though Open GL has been disabled for months (though most of my crashes do not have Open GL error messages). I’m rendering a file right now but as soon as it is done I will take the Open GL folder out of my adobe folder and see if that helps. I’ll let you know if it does 🙂

[Brandon Dennis]

It worked! I have literally been suffering from this problem for MONTHS, so thank you very much 🙂

[Bill Clark]

Did this stay fixed? I’ve been having the same problem but believe it is caused by Keylight sucking up too much memory. I’ve tried removing open gl updating keylight to 1.2.8 but it didn’t help. The only thing that worked for me is flicking the 3 gig switch – which messes up the computer in lots of other ways or running nothing else, purging, rendering out the offending scene (3 secs long) and re-importing the render.

Maybe things will get better when AE goes 64bit?

HP8600
Dual Intel quad core
4 gig Ram (why bother?)
Quadro FX 1400 (and I’ve tried a 1700)
XP Service pack 2

Bill Clark
Origami Films
Slate612

[Kenneth Kirkpatrick]

I have been having crashes with Keylight, too. Have you had any softness issues in the final render?

[Brandon Dennis]

Bill: Yes, manually removing the open GL files from my AE directory has still worked. I crash much less often now. Andrew Kramer says that if you use Color Key to get rid of most of your blue/green, and then throw Keylight on top of that to fine-tune it, that keylight has to work less hard and should save some system resources. I have been doing this faithfully with much compositing (every visible moment in my movies has compositing) and I honestly have not noticed any improvement in my system speed.

I have, instead, encountered a new problem. When I select both my Color Key and Keylight effects in my layer’s Effects Properties window and ctrl + c to copy them and paste them elsewhere, about 75% of the time AE crashes to the desktop, without even an error message. I have lost much work because of this. It doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough to be very annoying. To get around this, I have to select only one of the effects, paste it where I want it, and the select the other, and do the same. It only crashes when I copy 2 to the clipboard.

Kenneth: No, I have not had that problem. What I have had, however, is my movie squished down to a 4:3 aspect ratio, even though the composition settings are 16:9. I can get around this by changing my workspace to a much smaller part of the entire file and then rendering out the entire movie in ten second segments–this maintains my aspect ratio. But if I try to render something long, it gets squished. Very annoying.