Memory and rendering.

[Kevin Camp]

if you don’t have a separate drive on a separate drive bus (usually an external drive, like firewire, sata, etc.) for media, i would disable disk caching. it will usually end up creating a data bottleneck at that drive bus if you are using one drive bus for media (& renders) and a cache…

your system is a bit short on ram and processing power, and particle effects, like particle playground, are processing intensive… but you can help your system out by pre-rendering some of those nested comps.

open a nested comp, then choose composition>pre-render… this will add the comp to the render queue with a few extra settings to import the footage after render and replace the comps where the nested comp is used with the newly rendered footage (all automatically). it won’t delete the nested comp, you’ll still be able to open it make mods and re-render it if needed, but it can greatly cut down the amount of work that your system will need to do for that final render.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t know how many footage layers you may be using in your comps… but another thing that can greatly improve after effect’s performance is avoiding footage that use codecs that use temporal compression (also called interframe or ‘p’ or ‘b’ frame compression).

a few common codecs that use temporal compression are hdv, h.264, mpeg-2 and mpeg-4… they are good for nle’s but bad for compositing. if you use any of these types of codecs in ae, you can get better performance in ae by converting them (or initially exporting them from your nle/capture tool) as lossless animation or uncompressed avi. if you can’t afford the drive space for those files, quicktime’s photo-jpeg, prores 422, dvcprohd (or other sd dv variants) are a few that don’t use temporal compression.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paxson Woelber]

Thanks for the advice Kevin. The animation is entirely made up of images imported from Photoshop as PSD’s. Each scene is basically one image file, with the animation consisting of transformations to the layers and small-ish nested compositions.

Actually, the Particle Playground effects seem to render very quickly… it’s when I have nested compositions with the hue/saturation effect in play that things start to get slow.

The other thing that occurred to me is that maybe there’s a problem with the way I structured my compositions. I have one composition called “Main Timeline” that has all of the individual compositions on it, spaced out correctly as scenes. So when I play the “Main Timeline” comp, it basically just plays the finished animation. Is there a better way to do this? It seemed a little clunky…

Thanks again,
Paxson.

[Kevin Camp]

[Paxson Woelber] “I have one composition called “Main Timeline” that has all of the individual compositions on it, spaced out correctly as scenes. So when I play the “Main Timeline” comp, it basically just plays the finished animation. Is there a better way to do this? It seemed a little clunky… “

the better (and much less clunky) way to do it would be to use an nle to edit your final piece.. ae is not very adept at editing. however, for reasonably simple editing (this would seem to be just that), i would have done it in ae pretty much the way it sounds like you did.

can you preview these nested comps at full quality/resolution? are the image files large (3-4 times greater than the comp size)?

do you notice the ‘ram’ value in the render queue hits 60% and then the render crashes?

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paxson Woelber]

Hey Kevin. The images are double the final resolution of 800×450. So, twice the resolution, four times the area. I can preview the whole timeline at full resolution. RAM preview at full resolution crashes.

The nature of the crash is that a static hour hand comes up and AE stops responding or indicating any kind of action.

And, if it helps, AE freezes no matter what kind of rendering I try to do. I’ve tried JPEG and TIFF image sequence exports, MPEG, AVI, etc. Always freezes at the same place.

[Kevin Camp]

so it will preview (spacebar preview), but no tram preview (zero on the numbers pad)…. very odd.

i haven’t seen this before, but i think i’d try some standard trouble shooting techniques… one is re-boot the machine (if you haven’t already).

the other is to rebuild the ae pref file. you can do this by restarting ae and holding ctrl+alt+shift, which should then give you a warning/prompt to ask if it’s ok to overwrite or restore all preference settings… choose ok.

if that doesn’t, you might pull the entire ae preference folder to the desktop. i’m not sure where to find it in windows, but the folder is named ‘8.0’ and it should be buried in something like …preferencesadobeafter effects8.0. by removing folder that you’ll force ae to rebuild all the files within it, and hopefully clear things up.

if none of those work, i’d be curious what anyone on adobe’s ae forum has to say about a render that will preview render, but not ram preview or render thru the queue…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paxson Woelber]

It will RAM preview, just not for more than a few seconds at full resolution, depending on the clip. I can RAM preview at half resolution, skipping 2 or 5 frames, just fine.

Anyway, thank you for the advice, I’ll try everything you mentioned so far, and I’ll repost the results.

Thanks again for all the help!

[Kevin Camp]

sorry for that misunderstanding…

if you can ram preview the section(s) of comp that are crashing at render time, then ae should be able to render it… there are only a few things that may be different settings wise for a ram preview vs a regular render.

for your ram preview, do you have motion blur and frame blending enabled for previews (little buttons at the top of the timeline)? make sure those are enabled (as they would be for a render).

also check one other thing… go into preferences>previews and check the opengl settings. is opengl enabled and is it set to accelerate effects using opengl? if it is, also check ‘fast preview’ option at the bottom of the preview window (a little button that looks like a lightning bolt). click it and see if it is set to opengl-always on.

if it is set to always on, then you may also want to try and use opengl for renders too. add the comp to the render queue, the click the render settings (usually ‘best’). in the render settings, check the option for ‘use opengl renderer’. i do wonder about opengl, hue/saturation is an opengl accelerated effect… it may just be a coincidence, but if your previews are set to use opengl it may actually help the render.

those are about the only things that could be different for a preview render vs an actual render… so if all those match and you are able to ram preview the trouble sections, then try a render with the same settings.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Paxson Woelber]

Hi Kevin. Thank you for all the help so far. I’ve tried everything you’ve suggested, but I still can’t get the project to render much without crashing. I tried exporting as a PNG sequence and just starting over each time where the prior crash occurred, but it’s taking a very, very long time. I’m sort of reaching my limits of tolerance with this program..

Are there, by any chance, any companies or services that will render an AE project out for a small fee? Alternately, if I can find someone willing to do this, is it easy to usefully send someone an AEP file? All of the media for the project is in the same single folder as the AEP file. As long as the other computer has the same effects installed, would there be any issue with rendering somewhere else?

Thank you,
Paxson
paxsonwoelber.com

[Kevin Camp]

i can take a look at your project…

i assume you have one main comp that need to be rendered… the simplest way to get a project like that ready for transport (or archive) is to select the main comp, then choose file>reduce project.

this should remove any comps, solids and footage elements that are not being used in the main comp, or any other nested comps that are being used in the main comp. it’s also not a bad idea to remove any hidden layers or guide layers that won’t be needed prior to choosing reduce project, but there isn’t an easy command for delete hidden layers that i know of…

then you can choose file>collect files, you might crate a new folder called final project or something, then ae will copy all files used in that project to a new folder and save a copy of the project there too.

then you can zip that final folder up and it’s ready to go.

you can try to email it, but we’d probably be better off if you could post it up on your site for download (i have a file size limit on email, but if the zipped file size isn’t too big we can try email).

if you want to try this, my email is kcamp — at- – – kcpq – – – – dot — — com (ignor the dashes and spaces).

use of any third party effects can be problematic, so if you know you used effects not bundled with cs3, we would need figure that out too.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW