Memory Fragmentation

Adobe After Effects

Memory Fragmentation

Posted by Eric Liner on April 13, 2011 at 10:02 pm

I realize that there are a number of posts regarding this subject, but figure I’d throw this out there…

I’ve been working on a mapping project that makes use of a 14k (along the horizontal axis) satellite mosaic that has a cc sphere effect on it. The final comps use multiple instances of the “globe” for, lighting effects, glows, strokes, etc…

About a week ago I could work with at least three layers of this “globe” without a memory issue. Then I started to get fragmentation warnings, so I made adjustments to my memory and cache preferences and it fixed things for a while. Now I can’t render a full res version of my comp or see a full quality preview in the composition window no matter how I adjust the memory preferences. I installed 4 additional Gigs of RAM (for 8GB total) hoping that would help, but I still can’t render or see a full quality preview. Rendering half resolutions and previewing low resolutions is not a problem.

Here are my memory and cache settings:
Max memory usage: 200% of 3GB
Max RAM cache: 20%
Disc Cache Enabled: 15,000MB

So, why could I work with these assets one day and the next day nothing but issues? And will maxing out my RAM at 16GB solve this? I’d hate to invest in that only to find that there is still a problem.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Eric

Walter Soyka replied 15 years, 1 month ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
6 Replies

Roland R. kahlenberg
April 14, 2011 at 4:51 am

Sounds like you’re not on CS5. Working with memory and AE on a 32-bit app is akin to messing about in the black arts. Try pre-rendering the globes to lessen the memory issues.

HTH
RoRK

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Stewart Dalton
April 14, 2011 at 3:40 pm

If its not cs5 then your limited to 4k pixels. The only workaround i can think of is to render a lower res proxy and replace to footage so that it uses an image less than 4k.
Eric Liner
April 14, 2011 at 4:28 pm

Thanks,

Yes, your correct, I’m still on CS3.

But I think I partially solved some of the problem. I had “accidently” set the project to 16 bit when I was messing with a 2D map. Now I can see full res previews, but I think I’ll still need to pre-render globes, per your suggestion.

Thanks,
Eric
Stewart Dalton
April 14, 2011 at 4:42 pm

maybe spending time tweaking the ram settings might help?!

Stew
Eric Liner
April 14, 2011 at 4:42 pm

Probably true…nonetheless, with the color depth set to 8bits I’ve been able to render full res 1080 30p movies…until i add one too many layer, and then I’m stuck again.

Thanks,
Eric
Walter Soyka
April 14, 2011 at 4:55 pm

[stewart Dalton] “If its not cs5 then your limited to 4k pixels.”

Pre-CS5, an instance of the AE renderer was limited to 4 GB of RAM. (Multiprocessing uses multiple instances of the renderer, each in its own space in RAM, to speed up processing.)

The comp/image size limit has been 30,000 by 30,000 px (at 8bpc) for a long time.

Walter Soyka
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