“out of memory” “image buffer” errors when rendering

[Darby Edelen]

[chris Cummings] “Am I missing something?? Thanks for any help or advice! “

Doesn’t sound like it, but it would help us understand the issue better if you gave more specifics. What are your Memory & Cache settings exactly? Are you using multiprocessing? What are the dimensions that the buffer error returns?

These issues can be troubleshot, it just requires that you understand the way that the AE renderer works and walk through the potential problem areas (large layers, large comps, RAM/processor intensive effects, motion blur, depth of field).

You can read up on AE’s renderer a bit and how to get the most bang for your buck at:

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS4E58A2A3-FC7A-49a4-985A-62658804E014.html

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Chris Cummings]

Many thanks for the link and info Darby. This project was HD and probably pretty processor intensive despite being only 5 seconds. Looking forward to reading up on it more in the help link you sent (I’ve always found the manuals a little wanting in details in other apps, but this looks very good).

My current settings for Memory & Cache are:
Max memory usage: 160% = 3.0 GB
Max RAM cache size: 60% = 1.8 GB
Enable Disk Cache unchecked
Max Disc Cache size: 12000 MB

Eran suggested trashing prefs, which I did, but haven’t had a chance to test yet.

Thanks again,
~Chris

[Nicholas Toth]

Go to your prefs, hold shift and go to Secret in the dropdown.

Set it to purge ever 1 frame.

That always worked for me.

[Chris Cummings]

Hi Nicholas,

That was exactly the only way I could get this out, but I set it to purge every 100 frames. Just in comparing to others, it seems like I’m encountering this more with a decent computer/set-up. Would still love to get an octo-core Mac though 😉

Cheers,
~C

[Nicholas Toth]

Don’t get your hopes up;

We have 2 octos fitted with 32 gigs of ram and they both sported that screen before. We set it to purge after every frame, which hypothetically could add maybe 5-10% of a render time, but who cares if its going to work 100% of the time and not crash. Its such a stupid error!

[Chris Cummings]

Lol – wow! Those are monsters; guess I don’t feel so bad now 😉

I’m sure I’ll learn more about the rendering architecture, etc., but it is surprising compared to these other apps where I don’t experience this. That this seems a common enough problem that there has to be a “secret menu” – why not just make it a regular option??

Cheers, and thanks for the info.
~C

[Nicholas Toth]

buy nucleo pro too, I find I hit the problem less when running that vs. the internal renderer….

[Chris Cummings]

Good note, thanks Nicholas – I haven’t used AE much in the past, and as such, have a passing knowledge of nucleo pro…I thought it just sped renders up, but if this continues to be a problem, I’ll definitely look into it, esp. with the greenscreen work I have coming up.

Cheers,
~C

[Darby Edelen]

[chris Cummings] “but it is surprising compared to these other apps where I don’t experience this”

3D applications generally use a scan line renderer, which doesn’t require much caching. The AE renderer caches each entire layer as it renders so that it can potentially use the cached layer in future frames and avoid re-rendering it entirely. This can get very heavy on RAM as the complexity/size/bit depth of a layer/comp increases.

The basic rule of AE’s renderer is that if AE can render your largest/most complicated layer without any trouble, the entire composition should render without any problems (this can change with 3D shadows, since those require more than 1 layer to actually be rendered).

AE renders and caches each layer in a composition separately (not concurrently) and then composites them together, basically this means that you can have 1,000 layers that are each 30×30 pixels and it will never cause problems during render because each layer is cached and rendered separately, but if you have one 30,000 x 30,000 layer your render will fail every time because the memory required to cache this layer is enormous (8 bits per channel * 4 channels * 900000000 pixels ≈ 3.35 GB). If you apply effects to the layer then the RAM required to cache it increases yet again.

As far as I know, multiprocessing does not help with this, as each processor is delegated a frame of the composition to work on, and a single processor still only has access to 3GB of RAM.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Nicholas Toth] “buy nucleo pro too, I find I hit the problem less when running that vs. the internal renderer…. “

Does Nucleo Pro actually use a different render engine? It seems like it would be hard to guarantee that renders would end up the same as they would out of AE if that is the case. Although Nucleo may have better memory management, until I hear otherwise I think it’s entirely hypothetical =O

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA