Rendering Issues in AE Comp with multiple video clips playing simultaneously

[Brian Charles]

My first thought is that the source video is may be compressed in a format that uses a long GOP and when After Effects tries to reconstitute the frames on render it introduces errors.

If that’s the case try converting the video with Media Encoder to a format (eg: ProRes, DNxHD) which contains whole frames of data then replace the footage in your composition with the converted video.

[Michael Szalapski]

We are going to need a lot more information [link] to help troubleshoot.
All of the info mentioned in that link could be useful to figure out the problem, but there are some things that are super-important to know:

• Format and codec of the footage involved
• Exact version number of AE down to the decimal point
• Your computer specs
• Memory and multiprocessing settings (if applicable)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks for being willing to troubleshoot guys, here are some more specifics:

Running: AE CS6 11.0.2.11 on a MacPro 3.2 ghz quadcore, 8gigs ram, ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB, running OSX 10.8.5

Source footage: 1920×1080 Progressive h.264 Quicktime files out of a Canon 7D at 23.97 fps.

Quicktime Version 10.2 (603.17) installed.

No third party I/O software, just Adobe Creative Suite.

Not using OpenGL or the Ray Traced renderer, only classic 3D.

Render multiple frames simultaneously turned off.

The frame dropping, if that’s what it is, happens both during RAM previews and after rendering out, but not consistently.

I’ve tried a number of codecs during export: h.264 compressed mpeg 4, h.264 compressed Quicktime, ProRes 422 Quicktime, and I’m trying a lossless export with Animation/Quicktime right now.

[Michael Szalapski]

[Matthew Herzel] “Running: AE CS6 11.0.2.11”
Update! You are two major bug-fix updates behind. As of the last time I checked, the latest version of CS6 is 11.0.4.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks I’m giving that a try!

-Matt

[Brian Charles]

[Matthew Herzel] “I’ve tried a number of codecs during export: h.264 compressed mpeg 4, h.264 compressed Quicktime, ProRes 422 Quicktime, and I’m trying a lossless export with Animation/Quicktime right now.”

Its not the export codec that causes the issue. It may be the H.264 ingest from the Canon. H.264 does not contain whole frames and so After Effects needs to generate them. Try converting these first to ProRes *then* replace them in the After Effects comp.

[Matthew Herzel]

Thanks Brian, I’m updating AE and if that doesn’t do anything for me transcoding the source footage is the next thing I’ll try. Much appreciated.

[Matthew Herzel]

AH! Too late! Fingers crossed that I haven’t screwed myself overmuch, as I like neither missed deadlines or problem-solving under pressure. Other than transcoding my source footage to prores and updating AE, anything else you can think of to try Dave, or is this project doomed?

-Matt

[Michael Szalapski]

[Dave LaRonde] Okay, go ahead and do it if you like missed deadlines and problem-solving under pressure.”

Dave, he’s already having problems. This is probably a solution to the problem. (Although, transcoding the source footage to a production codec would also be likely to solve the issue.)

I grant that updating software in the middle of a project is usually not a good move (and it’s certainly not good to do major point updates and definitely a bad idea to do entire version updates), but this is a minor point update that was mostly bug-fixes and some of the issues that were fixed are issues that he is experiencing. 11.0.4 has been out for quite a while and there have been very few problems with it

But yeah, if Matthew’s deadline is today, I’d just transcode the source footage first.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Ericbowen]

Keep in mind 8GB of ram is not enough for Quad core CPU and AE. The memory management alone can cause random issues when data has to constantly re-cache to complete frame data on ram preview or export. I would suggest you get 16GB soon which will also help your performance with such complex comps. Comp complexity is one of the major factors to the dynamic amount of ram you require per frame. AE’s caching models though will only cache based on the amount of ram available that is not in use by the OS or graphics. This will lead to frame buffer corruption at times when the compositing of frame data cannot process all of the layers into that frame correctly with the amount of ram available. Also remember the player being used to decode the media also require ram to do so. This is often outside of the ram the AE render engine/player requires.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com