Tinderbox SIlk/After Effect 6 or Mac G5

[Aaron Schurman]

You should never be out of RAM in AE as it is Dynamic and clears memory when it’s done using it. More RAM just makes a difference on how fast a piece is rendered. You can try and reduce memory when rendering by either having the Caps Lock down or closing the Comp window alltogether and having only the project window and render window up. Other than that, what may be an issue is one of two things:

1.) You have a memory leak in one of your chips and it’s causing the crash. You can check this out by using either a program called Tech Tool Pro or just replace your RAM and see if it still does it

2.) Your plug-in is not the latest version. Check to see if The Foundry has placed an updated version on the web. I was having major crashes with Aurorix Bad Film and by updating the plugs it all works great now.

That’s all I can think of…hope this helps!

::AARON SCHURMAN::BOYWONDERSTUDIOS::
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[Scott Spengler]

You should never be out of RAM in AE as it is Dynamic and clears memory when it’s done using it.

Not so sure I can agree with this statement. I’ll frequently run out of RAM during renders due to layers being too large, depth of field settings, shadow settings, motion blur settings, Zaxwerks layers… lots of things. Then I have to go back in and track down the culprit. But to say you should never run out of RAM… ???? BTW, I’m kind of embarassed asking, but, what does pressing caps lock during a render do? Any info or tips on not running out of RAM is always appreciated by me. 🙂

MaryAnne,
Since the effect is only applied to part of your footage, have you tried jsut splitting the layer and applying the effect only to the part of the layer that needs it? Select the layer, press cntl+shift+D at the beginning of where you need the effect. This will give you 2 layers that are still synced together. Apply the effect only to the layer that needs it (the new,2nd layer). Split the layer again at the end of the effect and remove the effect from your now third layer.
As far as changes taking so long to show up as you’re working… that _may_ have to do with out of date plugs, and then yes, be sure you have the latest version. However, I’ve frequently have projects that update fine for the first several hours of working on them, and then they start to really bog down as you get more and more comps and sub comps and this reading that relating to blah, blah, blah… It’s really frustrating. What has helped is to turn off “Syncronize related elements” in the preferences. You really lose a great feature of AE, but they start updating at a reasonable rate again.

Good luck.

Scott

[Jon Herron]

There is also a “secret” setting in AE that allows you to purge memory after a selected number of rendered frames.

[Maryanne Hamill]

Aaron, as soon as you said memory leak that reminded me. I got a wierd error message shortly after that that read: After Effects warning: Tracked memory leaks detected. Advanced 3D: 16 bytes leaked Open GL 3D: 20 bytes leaked. That must be it. I had never seen that error message before. Thanks, MA
P.S. Where do you find that secret purge after so many frames option? I know Edit/ Purge/purge all but not where to set it up.
Thanks all

[Jon Herron]

https://www.toolfarm.com/tutorials/schecret.html

[Jon Herron]

This explains it better:

You can access these by holding the shift key while going to the preferences and then keep hitting the next button with the shift key still held and you will get to the schecret settings.

[Aaron Schurman]

Scott,
Thanks for the response, maybe I am wrong and haven’t worked in too many extremely difficult project (and don’t use Zaxwerks because I build most of that stuff in Cinema4D), so I am not guess I am not sure. I always thought that AE had a dynamic memory managment that always kept a chunk of memory clear to read from and write to and more memory just affected how much extra memory was set aside for reading and writing and the faster it cleared it out. But I guess when thinking about writing things like HDTV sized frames to memory with plugins added could more than likely cause some overload on the memory. Sorry if I gave the wrong information!

As far as the Caps Lock, it works the same as closing the comp window…instead of writing a frame to the hard disk and then writing a frame to the monitor, it shuts off the refresh to the monitor and just focuses on writing to a hard disk. You can turn the caps lock off anytime during a render to see progress, but as long as the caps lock is on, the monitor stays black (or shows the last frame rendered to the monitor). I presonally have seen some descent performance by doing this…but then again…maybe I am imagining things! Hahahaha.

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[Aaron Schurman]

Hmmm, very interesting Maryanne. The warning would seem to point to a possible leak in OpenGL. I am not sure what that would do for rendering, and I have never heard of a memory leak on a video card (which is where OpenGL is accelerated). You could try shifting your preview mode into software only (I believe it’s a setting somewhere at the base of your Comp window). Also, try the Caps Lock trick I mentioned earlier…this would allow rendering without sending any information to your video card, and should therefore bypass any chance of an OpenGL error. Just a thought! Good luck.

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