[Claire Presnall]

Thanks Boston,
We had a different project on a different MacPro (2019) (16-core with 196G of RAM) that worked just fine until we shut down and restarted the next day to find the same “won’t render” issue.
It’s not a versioning issue or a computer system issue, and these projects have all been on the simpler side in terms of layer count and effects. Cleared the cache (which is saved to its own drive, despite Adobe periodically resetting it back to my system drive. That isn’t the issue in the case. Cache is on the proper drive). I did all the usual restarting and cache clearing and making sure it wasn’t putting anything on the system drive, running nothing but AE, but still no rendering, which was why I was so baffled.

I went to the Adobe forum first to discover this is a continuing issue that Adobe has said “dang. That sure is rough for you folks.” and provided no suggestions for fixes from Adobe.

However, I discovered what may be my issue. Changing the size of a puppet layer can break the pin and force you to delete the pinning and redo from scratch. I had continuous rasterization turned on, which made Puppet Pin think I was changing the layer size.

So the fix:

For an Animation using a camera and 3d layers:
Precomp the layer. Scale the comp & layer to the largest size you’ll need (we were doing a camera zoom in 3D space, so we scaled to 800%). Turn on Continuous Rasterization in that Precomp.
Go up a Comp where your 800% scaled Precomp is now 100%. Do your pinning here. Make sure Continuous Rasterization is off in this Precomp
Go up a Comp to your main working comp where all the other bits and pieces and your camera are. Set your scale to 1/8 size so it fits back in to the little puzzle of layers.
Now you can do your zoom and everything works because the pinning is in a comp with no scaling. Yay!

This also works if you’re doing something without a zoom and your pinned layer will stay the same size but the designer sent you a 150×150 file for a 1080×1080 final output so you’ve scaled up the vector layers and want to make them crisp with continuous rasterization.

At this point, my 1st step in pinning will be to replace the pinned layer with a PreComp of that layer and do all pinning on that PreComp.

I think one of my issues was I had to go back into the original AI file to adjust the color on a totally separate object, but when I saved that file, the pin freaked out about the layer (that had no changes in AI, mind you), and I had to throw out the pinning and start over. By doing the pinning on a PreComp, Puppet Pin was none-the-wiser about any changes to the original illustrator file.

I haven’t tried your suggestions 6 or 7 yet, but I’ll keep those in mind as I
work today if we continue to have issues, but so far, my solution seems
to be working.

[Claire Presnall]

Hi folks! Thanks for your suggestions.

Eric, I’d prefer to keep my patterns as vector shapes so I can resize to my (the client’s) heart’s content.

Chris, it’s definitely the edges of the swatches showing, but I can’t make the issue appear IN AI, so I have to tweak, save, look in AE, make more tweaks in AI, curse at Adobe, check AE, back to AI, dream about moving into a cave and living off the land.

I’m not building these AI files, they are being built and approved by an agency. I’m not great at AI, but I know enough to get it into AE for animating (usually without issue) and make some tweaks with only minimal cursing (until the last 2 weeks with these stupid dot patterns).

After this issue popped up again on a new project, I did another search and found this adobe link: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/importing-illustrator-file-with-pattern-to-after-effects-problem/m-p/10897517

Honestly, I couldn’t make any of his suggestions work, so I just brute forced it again by swapping out for an older swatch that worked and resizing it so the dots were close to the original size/pattern. I still haven’t figured out why the patterns I’m getting from this one designer aren’t working while the patterns I get from every other designer in this group do and have for years. (Today’s fun pattern issue showed up as a plain white field in the AI pattern windows, but it’s clearly white dots on red in the file, so I couldn’t even see to tweak it in AI). I don’t know enough AI to trouble shoot it, and this seems to be an AI issue more than an AE issue, so I should probably move my question over to that board.

Thanks again! And if I find a solution that works with my non-AI brain, I’ll come back and share it.

[Claire Presnall]

Update! (no there isn’t a solution, just more info on the issue and pictures!)

I think this is an AE 22.4 issue. I don’t remember having this problem in previous versions, and the computer that has been using AE 2021 hasn’t been having this issue (until today when I used AE22.4 on it). I JUST updated to 22.5, so we’ll see if that fixes it.

My latest project had 1080×1080, 1080×1350, and 1080×1920 vertical versions of videos. I filled my render queue with 422 (HQ) outputs with the 9x16s at the top of the queue. The 9x16s looked great, but the 4x5s and 1x1s came out black. They were all the right file size, but the 1x1s and 4x5s were black video with just a spinning grey wheel of nope. Not the rainbow wheel of doom at least.
Tried the ol’ 4444 trick, no go.
Restarted the program, resent everything back to the render queue, but this time I put the 1x1s at the top of the queue.
The 1x1s looked great, and 4x5s and 9x16s came out squished up into the top (1×1 section) of the frame and the bottom was full of that lovely “something has gone wrong” green.
Again, 4444 trick failed.
So I tried restarting the program and only exporting the 9x16s . That worked great.
Then I restarted and exported the 4x5s. Great again!

So that leads me to believe we’re getting hung up on the size of whatever gets output first.
My first go around, I had the 9x16s at the top, so when there wasn’t enough pixel info to make a 9×16 in the 1x1s and 4x5s, they just gave up. When I tried again with the 1x1s at the top, they tried to make everyone else fit the image info into a 1×1 and filled the rest with green.
I should test again with the 4x5s at the top, but I haven’t had a chance to try that yet. I’ll give it a go after I’ve hit today’s deadlines and report back.

One last hitch, though. I also do a lot of ribbon boards which are super weird and random sizes, but they’re all horizontal. I never have this issue outputting a variety of different ribbon boards from the same queue. It doesn’t matter if some are 24000×48, some are 18000×48 and some are 1500×72, they output just fine back to back to back and even output a vertical in the queue if need be. So this seems to be an issue mostly on these vertical videos that all have the same pixel width (1080).

Some workarounds I found were to
1 Restart and cross my fingers. (this usually doesn’t work on my machine. Once it decides your 9×16 is half green, there’s no getting a 9×16 422 (HQ) out of that project. But thankfully for the machine I was using today, this did the trick)
2 Switch my 9:16 output from 422 (HQ) to 4444. (this usually works on my machine, but didn’t work on the machine I was using today)
3 Dynamically link the comp to a Premiere sequence, and export there. (guaranteed to work every time. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it)

I can’t send to Media Encoder on my machine as it has refused to see anything out of AE for the last several years no matter the version (yes they always match). I didn’t try on the computer I was using today. That includes outputting live Dynamic Comps through Premiere which output as missing. Trying to send it to ME from AE has finally upgraded from “never arrives” to sometimes arrives but always fails the export, so my Premiere workaround above has to be exported one comp at a time.

Today’s Mac with the issue:
Mac Pro (2019)

3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W

192 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

Monterey 12.4 (21F79)

AE 22.4.0 – Build 56

[Claire Presnall]

It seems to be mostly an issue with ProRes 422HQ, because I just exported some lovely 4444s that are nice and proper right out of AE.

Also, the file size is 1080×1920, so it’s exporting the right number of pixels, just in all the wrong places.

Computer set up:

Mac Pro (2019)

3.3 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon W

256 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

Monterey 12.3.1

AE 22.4.0 (Build 56)

[Claire Presnall]

Thanks. No keyframes anywhere (these are all global effects).

It’s right next to a cut to a new shot, but at the tail end of a shot that has been showing lovely light wrap for many seconds. The light wrap just gives out about 10 frames from the end of the clip.

I went through all the effects again, and I seem to have found a solution.

I went into my nested sequence where the Ultra Key is applied (because Boris light wrap doesn’t see the keyed edges of a non-Boris key if they’re on the clip together). I had applied a global mask to clear out the corners of trace green dirt rather than jack my key up any further and risk chonkier edges. The clip that was losing the wrap is a CU (zoomed in), so the edges are out of frame. I cut my nest, I cut my clip, I deleted the mask from just that 10 frame segment. Light wrap is back on in the main comp.

I’m not sure why it was cool with the mask up to that point, but it’s working now, so I’m not going to question it.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[Claire Presnall]

I AM in “dark theme” and yet, that import window insists on being the whitest white. Thanks for the suggestion. I definitely went to double check my settings with hope in my heart.

[Claire Presnall]

Maybe only 998 suns. But it’s definitely a lot, especially since my working windows are dark grey and the surprise import window is somehow brighter than those 998 suns of my hatred).

And ctrl/cmd+i is how I prefer to import. My thought is, “if I want to import, I’ll tell you, Adobe, thank you very much.” So while I’m perfectly fine importing with the tidy and controlled way of ctrl/cmd+i (vs this reckless abandon of double clicking everywhere), I still can’t figure out how to turn off this annoying “feature” of double clicking opens the import window over the top of my work making me have to trundle my cursor over to cancel it.

[Claire Presnall]

Last update, then I’m moving on with this unless I find the illusive definitive answer.

Today I was able to output one of the 2 files that had multicams (the suspected culprit) with absolutely no issue. I did change from exporting h264s to QT 422 HQ, so I thought perhaps that was the fix (it’s what I successfully exported from AE in desperation in my first post).

So I moved on to the second video, and nope. Not working. It hated all the different ways I tried to export it. After 23-27% completion, the whole machine just locked up. I could force quit after a few attempts, and I never had to hard power off. But if I tried to do anything without first shutting down and restarting completely, the whole system was just too mad to function.

After trying a variety of export settings, I created a new comp, unlinked my audio, and flattened my multicams. Still no good. 23-27% and then we just sat waiting until I couldn’t take it anymore and went through the whole force quit, shut down, restart rigamarole.

So I sent it on to AE, spit out a beautiful QT 422 HQ, brought it back into PP, slapped it on top of my audio cut, and BOOM! Export. And a speedy one at that. I looked away and when I looked back, we were done.

So maybe it’s the MXFs, maybe it’s the multicams, maybe it’s Adobe is cruel and awful and just loves to torment me, I don’t know. But I do know that AE is my friend and PP can eat a turd (today. Who knows what fresh hell tomorrow will bring).

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[Claire Presnall]

But actually, I spit it out of AE, brought the mov of the edit into PP, dropped it on top of the disabled video and used the multicam audio (because when I flattened it, it chose whatever audio was attached to the visible clip rather than the good audio on the main camera), and voila, everything exported beautifully. So the multicam audio wasn’t an issue there.

[Claire Presnall]

Based on all my workaround attempts, I think you’re right that it’s the multicams vs the MXFs. The multicams were janking my audio levels too, and just being all around not friendly, but they seemed less irritated by the .movs and .mp4s. The multicam video was disabled at the sticking point, and we were seeing straight MXF b-roll (hearing multicam audio), so I was thrown off the scent. My error reports kept listing specific files and timecodes, making it :40ish seconds into a 3 minute edit, and I foolishly believed them, wasting 2 hours removing and replacing clips, trying to find the secret formula before flattening the multicams and sending everything through AE. The flattening was probably the fix, and the AE was probably unnecessary.