Weird Rendering Issue

[Larry S. evans ii]

That’s almost the definition of limited memory. I would ask you to answer the following questions though, as it may be of some help in diagnosing the problem:

1. When you say “do something to the comp”, do you mean do ANYTHING to the comp, or just do the same thing that you were trying to do but didn’t complete? It may be that this particular task is causing some failure in the system, however, if ANY change to the comp produces the error, then there’s probably a different cause.

2. Are you saving the comp before trying to render? This would tend to argue for a memory problem. In other words, you’ve made a change and all of that change is in memory somewhere. When you go to render, the system runs out of memory or scratch space because it’s already storing all the changes. You may be able to fix that with either saving the file, or purging the file. If you want to be able to reverse those changes after rendering, then use “Save As” to a new file and see if that works.

3. Are you using an external hard drive for scratch space? Sometimes external drives go into “sleep mode” either due to driver settings or the OS and if they don’t properly respond to a wake-up call from the application, then it can cause errors, either because the scratch space is not there when expected, or because parameters written out to it are not accessible. To fix that, either use internal (and awake) drives for scratch, or change the drive settings to make it stay awake unless you tell it otherwise. Not sure how to do that on a Mac these days.

If those don’t help, you might see if there are large temp files floating around on your drives from the previous crashes. Failing that, you might try reinstalling After Effects to make sure it has all the proper libraries and that none of them have become corrupted. I am presuming you have not installed any updates to either the OS or video drivers, etc. recently, but if you have, try rolling those back to the last version and see if the problem goes away. -R

Larry S. Evans II
Executive Producer
Digital I Productions