render issue: AE locks up on a specific frame

[Steve Roberts]

You need to find out what’s special about that frame, or that number of frames rendered.

Hide layers, especially those with effects until it works.
Disable effects (the “fx” switch) until it works.
Disable audio layers until it works.
Check your OS utility that tells you how much RAM you’re using.
Disable Open GL.

.. then get back to us. 🙂

[Brian Johnson]

When I reduce to 1/4 and do a RAM preview, it works fine. But if I try to at full quality, or try to render at full quality, it locks up AE. I’ve only got 1 GB of ram and I’m doing some pretty complex stuff with the help of Mr. Kramer and his Riot Gear product. Do I need to upgrade my RAM, maybe?

[Steve Roberts]

Yow! 1 GB is nothing these days — you need at least 2-4, or 1 per core. If you’re on Windows, open Task Manager, and if you’re on Mac, open Activity Monitor to check your RAM usage.

Now if you want to render while you still have only 1GB of RAM, try the secret prefs. Access Preferences>General, and hold down the shift key until you see the big Prefs dialog. Hold down the shift key longer than you think, if necessary. Click general to see the drop-down, and you’ll see “secret” at the bottom of the list. Try purging every 5 frames during Make Movie there.

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

You should definitely upgrade your RAM, no question, but you still might be able to do this.

Watch this video about the Secret menu and dumping your ram cache during render:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/workflow_2.php

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
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