Bret Snyder
Forum Replies Created
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120% and 40%, with disk cache unchecked. I turned it down from 60% when I did the latest tests, including the one from the screenshot.
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The memory came in today. Tried it out with one keylight in the scene (one not rendered). Had 4 cores going with 8 gigs of memory. It rendered just fine. Had around 2.5 gigs of memory free by the time was render was done.
Tried it with both people in the scene (2 layers using keylight). Ran outa memory. I wasn’t paying attention to the activity monitor. Tried another render, this time with 2 cores on. Ran out of memory again; however, Activity Monitor said it had 3 gigs of memory free to use at the time of the error message.
Now, I’m actually receiving error messages (pop ups) that say:
After Effects error: Keylight out of memory. (4)
(25 :: 241)In all of my earlier tests with 4 gigs of memory, I wasn’t getting this error. It would just quit and the render status said Failed.
I took a screenshot of the results below.
I take it something more is wrong if AE is telling me I’m out of memory when I clearly have ~3 gigs left. 🙁
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The only other things to render with the scene aside from the 2 keylight layers are a background layer (jpg) and an audio layer (microphone). I wouldn’t think the addition of these 2 simple layers would honestly make the render perform much slower. But you’re the expert, so if you think I should be pre rendering the 2 key’d layers, I will.
To do that, I just turn off the other 2 layers (there are 4 total) and then go to Pre Render? Then import that finished comp back into AE and render what would now be a quicktime file on top of my other 2 layers? Is that essentially what pre-rendering is?
FWIW, I also updated keylight to the latest version from your link; thanks. I’ve gotta say – I’ve never seen a more helpful and responsive forum before. This is great. Thanks so much.
Now, another person had said that keylight can bring even the beefiest machines to a slow grind and they thought the extra 4 gigs of ram coming in should really help. But I also understand, like you said, AE shouldn’t be consuming all of my memory when it renders.
I’d rather not use the purging technique if I can avoid it because this comp will need to be created on a near weekly-basis. I’m just crossing my fingers here, hoping this extra ram will help me out.
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Using your purge idea, I’m about 10 minutes into this render and it’s taking about half of what is usually takes. Average of 500 megs of memory usage from AE, vs the usual 1.85 gigs.
The composition is extremely simple, imo. This is what it is:
background layer is a library (with 2 chairs) cg scene, which is just a jpg. I filmed two men sitting down having a converstaion in front of a green screen, which I keyed out (just the 2 men) and then applied a hue/sat modifier to decrase the brightness to -100. That’s it. Comp size is 320×240. I keyed them seperately from the same source file (2 layers) and positioned them in the chairs of the background scene. I am *completely* baffled that something which seems so simple, especially given the comp size, is requiring so much memory to render. But then again, I’m no video editing guru either. Maybe this is normal – I don’t know.
One question I do have. Does comp length have anything to do with memory usage? Would a 5 minute comp take just as much memory as a 6 minute comp? Or does length make the memory usage vary?
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I turned multiprocessing off and this is what happened:
About 17 minutes into the rendering process, everything was just fine. The memory usage of AE was sitting at a dead-steady 1.83 gigs of ram. Around 20 minutes in, I glanced back at the activity monitor and noticed a big increase of memory usage up to 2.84 gigs and sure enough, it crashed seconds later. Is this kind of memory behavior normal even with multiprocessing turned off?
I did a purge > all before that test. I haven’t tried 3 or 4 yet – going to now.
What is an image buffer size error?
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Thanks very much for the response. An Adobe employee thought it was just because I only have 4 gigs of ram. I ordered 4 more (total of 8) – which I understand isn’t enough to power more than a few cores, but because I use cs3, I’ll need to limit the number of cores AE is using by using a text editor (which I don’t know how to do). Would you be able to help me with that?
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SOLUTION!
I believe I found a solution. Earlier today, I found that I could import the footage into AE and as long as it was untouched, it would render perfectly.
So, I imported each segment and immediately did a render (giving me 7 new files). Importing these new renders into my composition and using them like footage files allowed me to edit them without the frame choppiness. It seemed like it was a combination of the media used and AE’s editing that gave me that undesired result.
I *think* this is the end of line for this problem. I can’t guarantee it, but I’m pretty sure the problem has been solved. Just to be sure, I’ll finish the composition and report back when it’s complete.
Again, thank you all for your great assistance. I wouldn’t have been able to solve this silly issue without you.
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Ok, I think I found out the problem..which boggles me. The footage will play just fine As Long As the opacity of that layer isn’t modified. The second I start modifying opacity, the footage starts jumping all over the place.
What I have are several layers, each with their own footage. During the timeline, each layer’s opacity lowers to reveal the next layer, and so on. So, essentially the 30 second clips of footage are fading out to show the next clip segment, until all of the clips have been shown. I don’t understand why this would also make my footage jump/skip around. The footage (in frames) appears to be playing like this:
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,6,10,6,10,11,12,13,14,10,14,10,14,15,16, etc…the footage keeps skipping backward. It’s absolutely bizarre.
Edit: I normally wouldn’t do this, but I don’t know what else to do. I would *greatly* appreciate it if anyone would take 10 minutes to download and scrub through two of my AE files. One is the version that I didn’t do ANY modification to (I just dropped the footage in and let it render). The second is one I started building framework for (and began to modify the opacity of the footage).
Inside the folder are the 2 AE files, the 7 pieces of footage and a background image for the framework. I am asking if someone/anyone will just scrub through both files so you can see exactly what should be happening and what IS happening when I attempt to modify the footage. Link:
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Right. The computer that I installed QT Pro on is also the computer with FRAPS installed, which is why I’m boggled that QT Pro can’t read the footage.
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Well, I spent the last several days sending and receiving a barrage of emails to the FRAPS tech support to try and resolve the issue. The most frustrating part is that I don’t know where the fault lies – either in the conversion process with the FRAPS footage OR if it’s something in AE.
I did find something extremely interesting in that when I simply import the converted AVI files into AE and drop them in their own new composition, the render comes out just fine. However, if I expand the composition (from 320×240 to 640×480) and begin editing to make a scene, then render it out again, it becomes choppy. I’m really beginning to think it’s my ignorance of the inner workings of AE. The editing I’m doing is very simple…just adding a background for the footage and inserting text. Why would this be conflicting with the footage?
I’ll start over the 3rd time and reimport the footage and build the simple scene and report back.
For what it’s worth, I did purchase QT Pro, but that couldn’t even read the raw FRAPS footage to be able to convert it to a QT Animation file…$30 not so well spent, but I’m to the point of a mental breakdown as this is the final piece of the puzzle to my demo reel. The second this part is done, the reel goes out the door.
Thank you all again for being patient with me. I’m very grateful of everyone’s assistance here.