CS5 After Effects Hanging on a Mac

Adobe After Effects

CS5 After Effects Hanging on a Mac

Posted by Rob Chan on May 5, 2011 at 2:49 pm

Hi Everyone

I’m currently working on 2 separate corporate films – Both require work done in Premiere with Dynamic Links to After Effects.

Both films have timelapse sequences shot from Canon 5Dii JPGs

1 has video footage shot from a Canon 5Dii (H.264 Mov files)
The other has footage shot from Panasonic AG-AF101 (XDCam Mov files)

However both films after several actions within the app cause After Effects to slip into a coma and display the spinning Beach ball. It’s a bit hit and miss as to whether the Mac recovers – depending on the level of work I’ll sometimes give it up to 5-7 mins grace to come round.

There’s no rhyme or reason so as far as I can tell, as I can’t determine a pattern.

I’ve tried Un-Checking the Render multiple frames Simulatneously as well as Un-Checking Enable OpenGL

I’m running a 2x 2.28GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro 3,1
Mac OS X 10.6.7
20gb RAM
300gb of available space on the App hardrive
NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT

Any thoughts, solutions would be gladly welcome

Rob

Rob Chan replied 15 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Tudor “ted” jelescu
May 5, 2011 at 5:30 pm

CS4 or CS5?
For CS4 get the latest update- the one that came after CS5 came out. Then I’m afraid you may have to transcode the footage.
If you have CS5 you should not have any issues, just make sure you’re updated.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
Rob Chan
May 5, 2011 at 5:43 pm

Yes I’m using CS5..and the problem won’t go away
Brian Charles
May 6, 2011 at 1:28 pm

I suspect its the footage compression. Two differing Long GOP formats, try transcoding these to JPEG or PNG or Animation, any format where the frames are actually present.

To quote Mr. LaRonde:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVCHD, mp4, mts, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
Rob Chan
May 6, 2011 at 2:35 pm

Thanks Brian, I am currently rendering out my assets in Animation and hopefully the problem will go away.
It sounds logical and obvious now, I just couldn’t see the wood for the trees but I’ll let you now how I get on

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