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New machine still craters when 24 Gigs of memory exhausted
For years I’ve found great solutions on the COW, but I’ve hit a problem I just can’t seem to work around.
I’ve got a great new computer. Dual Nahalem Quad Cores, 24 Gigs of memory, Windows Vista 64-bit, big RAID drives, etc. I’m really happy with how fast it is. But on long projects, as I render, I can see the memory usage rise on task manager until the memory is maxed out and the system crashes.
And this happens under any settings I seem to try, including various processor configurations, or multiprocessing off, and/or the “secret” buffer being cleared repetitively. The only variation in the scenario is that when I change the settings, the trajectory of the memory usage rises faster or slower, but always with the same result.
I’ve been trying to isolate the issue on a stripped down project that only has a single piece of 740×480 video. I’m only rendering it out to a file – the type of encoding doesn’t seem to matter. There are no effects in the project at all. It couldn’t be simpler. It’s about 30 minutes long, and depending on the settings, if I’m using lots of processors and assigning lots of memory the crash happens early, if I’m trying single processor rendering it happens later. But it always happens. And the log file doesn’t report anything unusual before the system locks up.
If all I had to work on was short projects, this would be a dream machine. But for longer video I need some piece of insight that has escaped me so far. Any ideas?
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13 Replies
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What version of After Effects? If you’re running After Effects CS4, have you updated to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2)? That update fixed some crashing problems.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Sorry Todd,
It was late and I was afraid I’d leave something out. I’m running CS4 and have updated to 9.0.2.42. What do you think?
Dave
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This might sound dumb.. but can you post a screenshot of your AE view? like your workflow area? so we can see how things are layed out? It probably won’t help any, but just wanting to see if anything I suggest you haven’t already done..
Also, you said you have DUAL QUADS.. as in 2×4=8 i count 16 cpu graphs.. ? Sry if that seems like a noobish statement, but I have no experience on a 64bit machine (as I can’t afford one.. yet).
-Jeremy
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Jeremy,
Here’s the screen shot. As you can see it couldn’t be much simpler.
As for the image of “16 cores” that’s because AE sees a single dual threaded core as two separate cores.
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Wow… that IS simple :S
Just wondering if its the filesize… AE has an issue when files get too big…
Have you tried using a different app to split the video into a few segments and then importing the pieces and trying that way?
I had issues w/ a 5 gig .AVI at one point.. had to split it into several chunks to even keep AE running..
I’m shooting from the hip here, but am at least trying to help ya, hope it’s of some use..
*the noob to the rescue* 🙁
-Jeremy
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Size of the video doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve even tried looping a short video, but it still crashes at a certain point.
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What are your memory settings at?
on an 8 core system, if you maxed out how much ram per core (aprox 3.5g) you would need about 28 gigs of ram + enough for the system to run..
Screenshot of your ram settings?
Even if i can’t help, all the information presented may spark someone else’s imagination to a solution..
-Jeremy
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Hi Jeremy,
As I mentioned, I’ve tried every memory setting and combination of processors I can think of including turning off multiprocessing. Posting screenshots of all the variations would extend the length of this message more than most would care to read.
Hopefully the experts can visualize what they think the problem might be or what settings they would like me to try (or confirm that they’ve already been tried). Thanks again for your interest.
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DOH!
I should’a known that was coming 😀
Thanks Dave, completely forgot about that!
I’ll add that to the top of my “most important things not to forget” list hahahaha
-Jeremy
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Hi Dave,
And thanks for your “Stock Answer”. My problem exists regardless of the type of footage I’m rendering. MOV and AVI files exhibit the same increasing memory phenomenon. Actually the MPEG file – which was long, and so was the first one that exhibited the problem I’m describing – works flawlessly until the crash, just like the other files which you recommend using. Thank you for your comment.
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