Crazy AE Error

[Curious Turtle]

Do a search in this forum for “Secret Preferences” and that should help you get the render out.

All the best,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
Training | Editing |Support

http://www.curiousturtle.com

[Darby Edelen]

[Pouyan Fard] “”After Effect Error: Could not create 815X1400 image buffer” “

AE is trying to cache a layer and either running out of memory or experience memory fragmentation. If you are running out of memory then you will need to do one or more of the following (listed from most desirable to least desirable):

1) reduce the number of effects on the layer (large blurs and time based effects such as echo are the worst offenders).

2) reduce the resolution of the layer, consider breaking it into 2 or 4 smaller layers (believe it or not AE likes this a lot more than 1 big layer)

3) turn shadow diffusion down or off

4) turn depth of field off

5) turn motion blur off

If you’re experiencing memory fragmentation then you’ll want to reduce the Maximum RAM Cache Size in your Preferences > Memory & Cache, and make sure you have “Prevent DLL Address Space Fragmentation” checked. Keep your Maximum Memory Usage at around 120%. You can enable the Disk Cache as well, but this will eat up space on your Hard Drive so keep the Size relatively low-ish (2000-8000MB).

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Ben Heusner] “Do a search in this forum for “Secret Preferences” and that should help you get the render out. “

I suppose I could’ve included that in the list, but it’s the absolutely last thing you should try. It significantly increases render times, especially when you have complex layers/comps as it sounds like you do.

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Joey Foreman]

You could also try compressing the layer in Photoshop > Save for Web & Devices or Image Ready if you have an older Photoshop. Keep it the same resolution but futz with the compression settings in the 2-Up window so that it’s visually lossless but a smaller file size. JPEG high quality works well.
You probably won’t be able to apply any color effects in AE afterwards without artifacting, so get your colors right in Photoshop first.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Animator
Nowhere Productions, Athens, GA

[Darby Edelen]

[Joey Foreman] “You could also try compressing the layer in Photoshop > Save for Web & Devices or Image Ready if you have an older Photoshop. Keep it the same resolution but futz with the compression settings in the 2-Up window so that it’s visually lossless but a smaller file size. JPEG high quality works well.”

I’m pretty sure that this won’t benefit you at all in AE. I’m almost positive that the only footage properties that will affect the amount of memory required to cache a layer in AE are its resolution and bit depth (before effects, masks, or anything but the base layer is taken into account).

AE doesn’t cache a JPEG as a JPEG or an MPEG as an MPEG or a PSD as a PSD. It decodes it, renders it and caches it as raw image data. So to get a sense for how much RAM a layer will require with no effects, no motion blur, no nothing applied to it you can use this formula:

Width in Pixels x Height in Pixels x Bits per Channel x Number of Channels = Total Bits

Total Bits / 8 = Total Bytes

Total Bytes / 1024 = Total Kilobytes

Total Kilobytes / 1024 = Total Megabytes

So the original poster’s 815×1400 image (assuming 8bpc and 4 channels) would require:

815 x 1400 x 8 x 4 = 36,512,000 bits

36,512,000 bits = 4,564,000 bytes

4,564,000 bytes / 1024 = 4,457 kilobytes

4,457KB / 1024 = 4.35 megabytes

Which is not very much at all. Although this is before taking into account effects and other factors. This leads me to believe that fragmentation may be at fault. The above operation can be concatenated into this:

(height in pixels) x (width in pixels) x (number of bits per channel) / 2,097,152

Which is from Adobe’s support documents here:

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS9F936D13-E76A-41e4-BF8F-577132AB4723.html

Which has a lot more information on this.

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Joey Foreman]

Pouyan, sorry for the bum advice. Hope you didn’t waste any time with it.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Animator
Nowhere Productions, Athens, GA