Zero Denominator Error when keyframing Puppet Tool

[Michael Szalapski]

What size is your comp? What kind (and size) of images are you using?
Any chance you’ve got HD footage in there and Dave’s Stock Answer #1 strikes again?

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

– 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.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I don’t quite get it. I have this problem and I can’t get it to work. I’m just trying to do a bit of wiggle on the footage. It plays, but then this error comes up.

It’s just a layer from a PSD. A rather large PSD. about 10kx7k (I have to zoom in almost 10x, so it’s actually necessary)

I’m also getting some issues with zooming in on the precomposed puppet tooled animation. I had to precomp because I realized the puppet markers don’t move with scaling of the whole object. Ok, no big deal, precomp. Well now there’s an odd halo around the layer. I thought maybe that would have to do with expansion? I’m not having much luck though.

[Vojtěch Palme]

I got this error too when I was rigging a character for animation.
My workflow was:
Make character in Illustrator
export to psd and simplify it
import to AE

Turned out Illustrator automatically merged some layers that shouldn’t be merged (eyes + feet) -> there were big Alpha gaps. The error stopped appearing as soon as I separated those into multiple layers.

[Ryan Wise]

I just go this error and resolved it by unchecking “inverted” in the mask