[Brian Fisher]

That worked perfectly, thank you. I used method 2 (I’m not planning on being a beginner for ever!)

I can see thousands of eventualities where I could use that technique, so thanks for the concise and helpful answer, it’s really made a big difference.

Mac Pro, 10.5.8, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB

[Brian Fisher]

Try checking your pixel aspect ratio under the AE composition settings. Your source material and AE comp should have the same ratio. Try changing it from what it is now (maybe from square pixel to 1.09) and see if that helps.

Mac Pro, 10.5.8, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB

[Brian Fisher]

Many thanks! Problem solved.

Mac Pro, 10.5.8, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB

[Brian Fisher]

What graphics card do you have? If it’s an NVIDIA 7300GT, it may be about to fail. LIke mine did. It was 18 months old. Those symptoms you describe are similar to what I got. Frozen screen, blue screen, scrambled screen, oh, everything really.

As you can see, I upgraded my card and now all is OK again.

Mac Pro, 10.5.7, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB

[Brian Fisher]

Aha. I think I just got it. Thanks for the input guys. It’s just weird having to realign my thinking on image dimensions. I’m still stumped as to why FCE seems so much faster than AE for identical processes, but that’s another post…

Mac Pro, 10.5.7, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB

[Brian Fisher]

OK, thanks for the input.

I hear what you say about dpi (yeah, I work mainly in print) but…

What I’m finding is that a 720×586 image created at 72dpi in Photoshop is only just over 1MB, so fairly easily animated in AE, but soft, blurry and poor quality. The same image but created at 300dpi is way sharper in AE but it’s now 20MB but impossible to animate and throws up the old “unable to allocate space for image buffer” error message. Especially when layered with a movie file.

Image sizes of the scale you are talking about would basically kill my Mac (specs below) and give me a nice beach ball to look at while AE keels over.

What I don’t understand is that the identical 20MB image – along with a bunch of others – is so easily animated in Final Cut Express, with a virtual instant preview at max resolution, on the same Mac.

I guess what I’m arriving at here is: If Final Cut Express can process these images smoothly, why can’t AE? I’m only doing simple rotations, after all.

Sorry if this all seems terribly newbie and basic, but I am determined to get a handle on this program, from the ground up. And that means nuts and bolts like this.

Thanks

Mac Pro, 10.5.7, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB

[Brian Fisher]

I thought Rosetta imposed a memory ceiling of around 1.5GB?

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/891369#891369

Be interested to see if 32GB works…

Mac Pro, 10.5.7, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB