Render Fails fails fails

[Ellen Osborne]

Well I turned off one of my lights and it looks like it might work. I’ll know in 6 hours. But while I’m here can anyone direct me to where I can learn about the best preference settings to get the most out of AE?

[Paul Bertham]

do you have the most recent AE update?

you could try running a disk permission repair via MAC OS disk utility.

another solution is to recreate AEs preference file.
shut down after effects and find the preference file Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs.txt in the directory
users/user name/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/8.0/

just replace the .txt extension with .OLD so you will keep this existing pref because if AE restarts it then writes a new preference file and intializes (reset) the software.
if this was not the way to solve your problem you then can trash the newly created prefs and rename the .OLD back to .txt

this could might also be a possible solution
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79a5.html

and here on improving performace
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WSF13D6BED-C53B-408a-B2D6-C8B4205D4FB7.html

but don’t expect miracles coz OSX isn’t 64Bit (still).

[Ellen Osborne]

Paul, Thank you for your response. I have AE 9.0. I did Disk Utility as well as trashing my preferences. Neither helped the problem. I will check out the links you sent. Thanks.

[Ellen Osborne]

The render worked after turning off one of the lights. Don’t know if the light was somehow defective or there were just too many shadow calculations going on from the 3 lights that I was using in the project. Don’t know, but thankfully I’m moving forward again.

[John Peterson]

You might try reducing the shadow map resolution in the composition settings. You may find the happy medium between shadows that still look good while cutting down on compute time.

[Paul Bertham]

most recent version is 9.0.1
https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4085

try auto update or download package from link above.

[Philippe Lessard]

For every render fails, when its a deadline crucial render you have no time to troubleshot, just try to purge your cache while rendering.To do that go to your AE pref menu while you hold shit and alt key together and you supposed to see secret(literally) at the end of the list of prefspane, open it and set it to purge every 15 frames for example.With this setting you should have no problem to render, at least with no memory error.

[Paul Bertham]

while you hold shit and alt key together

😉 if deadlines short, i bet everyone will have to hold everything together as much as possible 😉

btw. does this “secret” option still exists in CS4?

cheers

[Philippe Lessard]

Ah ah,
Sorry my english is not that good, and yes, this secret
still available in cs4, I have checked because we still work on cs3 because the plugins compatibility.

Hope is help.