HOW TO USE AE7 WITH INTEL MACS

[Graham Jones]

Hi Jim,

If you have followed all of the advice here (make sure you look at all of the thread and try everything mentioned) and you are still having crashes, it might be an offending plugin— try rendering with effects off, then try rendering enabling one effect at a time. Otherwise, you may have to try the AE 8 beta. Luckily, the full release version is coming soon and this thread will be moot.

As for quitting the other PPC processes, you need to open Activity Monitor (located in your Applications/Utilities folder) and use that to quit any PowerPC processes listed there.

I thought that was covered somewhere else in this thread…?

Hope this helps,
Graham Jones.

[Jim Sanders]

Mr.Jones thank you very much for your advice. The thread was very long and spanded a lot of time. I thank you for hitting some of the points that may have been covered in the thread.
I look forward to AE8.

Thanks again for your help

[David Franklin]

Just wanted to thank everyone for their diligence here. I was having mysterious crashing over the weekend on my AfterEffects 7.0 on an Intel Xeon Dual Core 2.66GHz machine. I was tearing my hair out until I found this thread.

Just to add some actual data to the conversation, I was getting “AfterEffects unexpectedly ended” messages with the option to relaunch the app while rendering particularly complex compositions (there were several hundred layers of hand-made particles).

Using the advice offered here, I reduced the AfterEffects memory allocation to 70% of my 2GB of RAM, which came out to 1.4 GB, which was just below the 1.5GB threshold discussed above. I also reduced the cache size to 30%. That worked beautifully for a couple of days, then I got another “could not generate a 720 x 486 buffer” message, which was another messge I’d been getting over the weekend prior to reducing the memory allocation.

So I further reduced the memory to 65% (1.3GB) and the Cache to 25% (which wound up being 512MB). And then the same composition rendered without incident.

So thanks to everyone for their feedback.

–Franklin

[Nick Berrisford]

I just wanted to thank Graham Jones (and others) for their suggestions and input.

While the suggestions haven’t solved my issue and I still get failed renders and the occasional crash, the frequency of them has dropped. Part of my problem is I am tied to using a collection of projects and comps that require certain memory intensive plugins and the problematic CC filters.

For those in that same boat, I have a suggestion that has helped me at least get something rendered and finished even if it isn’t the ideal and efficient workflow.

What I have resprted to doing with some of the memory intesive plugins in certain layers – and the CC ones – is prerender these layers when I have them looking the way I like them. I then replace those layers with a full quality QuickTime version in order to render the final full comp. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but more often than not I avopid failed renders and eventually I get my stuff rendered. Which wasn’t happeneing for a while.

Thanks again.

Here’s looking at the full version of CS3 coming out and all the third parties releasing UB versions soon!

BTW, does anyone know if CS3 will again ship with the CC filters? I noticed the Beta version available for download doesn’t.

[Graham Jones]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the comments. Pre-rendering, as you suggest, is a good habit in many situations— not just when the app is crashing. You can often transform a 1 hour render into a 15-20 minute render by keeping an eye on the most challenging layers and filters, and nesting and pre-rendering elements that won’t change much.

For myself, I can’t wait for CS3— though I have no idea how I’m going to pay for all the CS3 apps, Final Cut Studio 2, Leopard, and the Intel-native MS Office. Yikes! It will cost more than my Mac Pro. Oh well, at least my apps’ performance will be a lot faster then.

Cheers,
Graham.

[Steve Garman]

Are you guys talking about running the Mac version of AE on an intel Mac or the Windows version of AE on an intel Mac?

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

We’re talking about running the Mac version of AE 7 on an Intel Mac.

– Graham Jones.

[Miranda Yousef]

Hi all,

I’m at my wit’s end–I’ve been trying to render my
comp for almost 3 weeks now and I can’t get it to
work!! I’m coming up on a deadline very soon and I
really need help.

The Project:
I’m creating an opening title animation sequence for a
35mm film. I used LARGE Photoshop files (ca. 7200 x
5500 or thereabouts), imported as layers into AE so I
could animate the layers. The end result needs to be
at 2048 x 1556, so I set up a new comp at those
dimensions and fit each pre-comped segment (there are
4) into the smaller comp to maintain resolution
(sometimes I zoom in on things, etc.).

The System:
Power Mac G5 Quad (PowerPC), running AE 7.0
Professional on OS X (10.4.10). When I first started
I had 512 MB of RAM, quickly realized I needed more,
and upgraded to a current total of 4.5 GB. (Yesterday
I ordered even more so as to max out my RAM–I can go
up to 16 GB on this computer–but then found out that
maybe AE won’t recognize beyond a certain amount of
RAM anyway. Is that true?)

The Problem:
I need to export a series of DPX files at 2048 x 1556.
After I installed my new RAM, I broke up the export
into 4 segments. 3 of the 4 have been able to export
without a problem and are complete. The fourth simply
refuses to export even a single frame. Keeps giving
me the image buffer error.

I probably should also mention that at the same time
as I installed the new RAM, I hooked my computer up to
a so-called “battery backup” which failed in the
middle of the night. Up to that point, the export had
been going fine. I don’t know if the sudden power
loss to the computer screwed anything up.

The Tragic Attempts:
I tried resizing my original PSD’s, but when I
connected them to the AE comp everything went
crazy–layer positions were off, child-parent
relationships seemed to create problems, etc. I don’t
know if there’s a way to maintain RELATIVE positions
instead of ABSOLUTE ones when you resize the source
doc, but I didn’t feel up to tweaking everything all
over again.

I looked at the following website about this error, and re-assigning RAM usage etc.
(https://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not.asp)
…Did not work for me. (I am unable to split up my PSD images because I use all the layers.)

I also tried really lowering RAM cache and memory
usage as per the following:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_thread.cgi?forumid=2&postid=891369&univpostid=891369

…but I don’t have an Intel processor, and it hasn’t
solved my problems.

I trashed my prefs and restarted. No luck. I tried
exporting 2 single frames. It wouldn’t even do one.

Somewhere in here my error message started to appear
with a sheep’s bleat. This seems fitting in an
existential, God-is-laughing-at-me kind of sense.

Sorry for the long e-mail, but I really need to figure
this out. I have to deliver this right after Labor
Day, and I have limited time to work on this.

Please help!!!

Thanks,
– Miranda
Power Mac G5 Quad/PowerPC
4.5 GB RAM
AE 7.0 Pro

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

Miranda… These image sizes aren’t terribly large. I work with much bigger file sizes all the time. There’s an intro I update for a show every year where there are a hundred layers in a Photoshop file that is 3500×3500 pixels at 300dpi. What is the colour space for your Photoshop? Is it RGB. Maybe it’s CMYK. Not sure this would cause a memory error, but something is really wrong. Looks like you’ve tried all the memory and cache tips. Do you have disk cache enabled. Make it an outboard drive not the computer’s internal. Before you attempt a render purge all memory. This is very important. When you are setting up and moving around AE memory leaches away. This is a step I always take before pushing render. Are you using Nucleo Pro? It doesn’t appear you are. Some renders just don’t work with Nucleo. Would it be possible for you to upload your project and files and I can try and render for you. I have several Quad G5 macs as well as Intel Macs. The Intels seem to have more memory issues than the G5 Quads do.

Jack T.

[Andrea Stewart]

Graham,

Thanks so much for this discovery in the first place and all of your continued responses. Your advice worked great for me on my Intel Dual Core for my previous work. It saved my butt.

I’m now working on an HD project that’s 1920 x 1080 59.97 with many collapsed pre-comps, and it’s just a real RAM killer. Even using your settings and playing with them I wasn’t able to work on it without hitting the buffer problem at some point. I eventually had to breakdown and purchase Nucleo for the render.

Before I did that, I did download the demo of Nucleo Pro and I have to admit it makes things go so much faster as your working. I may have to splurge for the Pro version just to get my RAM previews going at a reasonable work pace. (Also because the standard version doesn’t help with the RAM previews, just the render.)

As a side note, I did trick out my machine with 8GB of RAM which I think NucleoPro was able to use 6GB of.

Thanks again.
Andrea Stewart
Germane Creative LLC

Andrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC