render error—please help

[Steve Roberts]

Some questions:
(please answer them all, and by number, as many people don’t) 🙂

1. Does this occur at a specific point in the render each time you try to render?
2. Are you sure you’re rendering to the drive (or partition) that has 70 GB free?
3. Have you tried rendering to a different disk?
4. Have you tried rendering to a TGA sequence, then reimporting?
5. Have you tried enabling the secret prefs? (search the COW for “secret”)
6. Have you tried defragging the drive?
7. To which codec are you rendering?
8. Can you try a different codec?
9. Which OS, which AE version are you running?
10. Were you rendering to your system drive?
11. Do you have anything else running that may be trying to access your drive (this would be a longshot)?
12. Can you try rendering with Task Manager (Win) or System Monitor (Mac) open to give you a clue as to what’s going on?

[Vince Becquiot]

You are not giving us much info there. I am assuming this is a PC from your disk cache comment. How are you rendering. Render queue?, Export ? Are you using any particular codec ?

Do you have just one disk drive ?

Vince

[Steven J casey]

Steve, answers to your questions:
1. Does this occur at a specific point in the render each time you try to render?
Yes, it stops at 0;02;18;06 every time

2. Are you sure you’re rendering to the drive (or partition) that has 70 GB free?
yes, I’ve double checked this each time I tried to render

3. Have you tried rendering to a different disk?
no, I have a system disk and a firewire media disk so always render to the media disk

4. Have you tried rendering to a TGA sequence, then reimporting?
no, I’ll have to look that up just to know what this means.

5. Have you tried enabling the secret prefs? (search the COW for “secret”)
no, have to search for this as well

6. Have you tried defragging the drive?
Yes, I do this on a regular basis

7. To which codec are you rendering?
trying to output video for windows, which I typically use and drop into Vegas to work on soundtrack, narration, etc.

8. Can you try a different codec?
not sure what I should use? QT?

9. Which OS, which AE version are you running?
Fresh install of XP Professional was done about a week ago. AE version 6.5 Standard

10. Were you rendering to your system drive?
no, rendering to an external drive dedicated to aduio/video files

11. Do you have anything else running that may be trying to access your drive (this would be a longshot)?
no, AE is the only open app. There’s probably some background things that could be shut off but in the past I’ve rendered without problem so not sure they would be an issue now?

12. Can you try rendering with Task Manager (Win) or System Monitor (Mac) open to give you a clue as to what’s going on?
I’ll have to give that a try.

Thank you so much for your help!!!
sjc

[Steve Roberts]

You may be trying to create an AVI that is bigger than 2GB, which may (still) be a problem with AVIs, or if your drive is FAT, there’s a file size limitation with that file format. 4 GB I think.

Check your AE prefs and try to segment your files there if they get bigger than a particular size.

[Steven J casey]

It must have been the 4 GB limit. Once I set AE to break up the files into 1 GB chunks it worked fine. I’m glad I learned about the secret prefs along the way as well!

Thanks very much for the help! The Cow to the rescue once again.

sjc

[Steve Roberts]

Ah, that’s lovely.