Odd rendering issue

Adobe After Effects

Odd rendering issue

Posted by Tristan Nieto on April 18, 2011 at 9:50 am

So I’m rendering a comp and it’s taking forever. I turn the little arrow down next to “Current Render” in the render queue and I see it running through all the operations fine, then suddenly it freezes at:

Composition: Title_01
Layer: 5
Stage: Retrieving Frame

… and stays frozen for about a minute. So I stop the render, go into the Title_01 comp and, not surprisingly, layer five is a particle layer (TC Particular, making about 2000 particles per second).

But here’s the weird. I disable the layer (turn off the little eye) but when I render it again, I get the same thing – it hangs at “Layer 5, Retrieving frame)” for a minute or so.

I then delete the particular layer altogether and render again, but I get the same thing – “Layer 5, Retrieving Frame” for about a minute. (At this stage, Layer five is a Null Object).

Does anyone have any thoughts on what’s going on here? Is that Current Render Progress thing even accurate? There’s nothing else in the project that is anywhere near as complicated as the particle layer. I’ve purged everything a number of times and even switched to a different computer, but it hasn’t made a difference.

Thanks everyone,
Tristan

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Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com

Kevin Reiner replied 15 years ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
5 Replies

Tristan Nieto
April 18, 2011 at 10:51 am

Okay, so I appear to have found the culprit.

Bizarrely, it had nothing to do with Layer 5 or Particular. It was the Fill effect on one of the layers (a video layer), which I only discovered through process of elimination.

Does anyone know why the Fill layer would be causing so much trouble? The only thing I can think of is that it’s something to do with the project being in 16bpc and the Fill Effect only supporting 8bpc.

Any ideas?
Tristan
Tristan Nieto
April 18, 2011 at 11:21 am

Okay, so the problem turned out to be more complicated than that.

It actually came from a missing font used in a text layer – but only when it was being used as an alpha matte, and only when the footage layer using it as a mask had any filters applied to it.

Downright weird if you ask me, but there you go.
Shahin Ghahremani
April 18, 2011 at 11:35 am

Tristan have you tried disabling or enabling your OpenGL feature inside AE? Cause I think this is something to do with your GPU settings. It might help, just check into your AE preferences and see whether OpenGL is active or not, if is active make it disable and check, because if you have something in your scene which is not supported by your GPU OpenGL version, it won’t render it properly! although if everything can be supported by the GPU then enabling the OpenGL is a big help in saving time!
Goodluck 🙂

Shahin

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Tristan Nieto
April 18, 2011 at 11:56 am

Thanks Shahin,

I’ve always had OpenGL disabled but I might play around with it and see if it makes any difference. Thanks for the hint.

Tristan

Tristan Nieto
Visual Effects & Motion Graphics
tristannieto.blogspot.com
Kevin Reiner
April 18, 2011 at 2:47 pm

Fonts can often cause screwy things to happen. As a test, try switching it to a system font and see if the problem goes away.

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