[David Cabestany]

Absolutely, where do you want me to send it? I can use wetransfer if that’s ok with you.

I’m guessing no footage, right?

Thanks,
D.

[David Cabestany]

Didn’t know that. Thanks for the tip.

I sent the same project to my laptop, with half the ram but a different graphics card.
I was able to render with MP on, up to frame 162, then it stopped as it did on the other machine.

This is really weird.

[David Cabestany]

At the bottom of the render queue, it says 5% (or whatever) of 32gb used.

[David Cabestany]

So I moved everything to a thunderbolt drive and finally was able to partially render.
I had to turn off MP and enable the secret prefs to purge the layer cache every 1 frame.

Then I soloed a bunch of layers to flatten them into one single layer and replace the other ones but I can only render a certain amount of frames, then it stops (no error generated) and the queue says: Will continue from and a frame number. So I close my bracket to the next frame after I stopped and continue, but it stops again several times over, each time being able to render less and less frames until it can’t render anything. The problem is when I look at my ram usage it’s only between 5 and 37% out of 32 gb and like I mentioned I’m purging the cache every frame.

Can anyone suggest a course of action after this modification I made to my setup?

Thanks.

[David Cabestany]

Jeff, yes, I started rendering to an image sequence, tiffs, but the render would stop every few frames and takes a long time, also it would drop random frames, so in the end became a highly unpractical solution, as I had to be standing next to the machine the whole time, ready to restart the render, and sometimes quit and restart the program.

Walter, I’m running Mavericks, I wasn’t aware of the App nap feature, I’ll check it out right now. Although this problem never happened to me before, then again, I never had such complex project in this machine.

I moved all my footage to a thunderbolt drive, I was bringing everything from the server before, through a
gigabit network, I’ll see if that makes any difference.

Thanks a lot again.

[David Cabestany]

After seeing your short sample I don’t think lumas or alphas are going to help you, you’re pretty much stuck with masking and rotoscoping. Since the arm and hand are on top the face no matte will help you.

Rotoscoping is tedious but it’s the best choice for what you need to accomplish, Just vary the feather and expansion as you animate the path.

[David Cabestany]

Ok, so here’s what’s happened today. Todd, I’m really hopping you can chime in on this, I’m completely puzzled.

I prerendered a bunch of layers and then I soloed to prerender them again as a single element.

As I started this second render everything worked fine with MP on and then my display went to sleep. I clicked a single key to wake it up and then the rendered was stopped with the following warning:

“After Effects warning: A frame failed to render while using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously. Allocating more memory to the background processes in Memory & Multiprocessing Preferences may fix this problem. (26 :: 142)”

So I started it again with MP off, and it started fine, it said it would take around 45 minutes. Then again, 13 minutes in the screen went to sleep again (just the screen, I have the hard drive set up to never go to sleep) and when I woke it up the render had failed again. Except this time the queue says: User stopped and no error is being generated.

I tried to start the render again both with MP on and off and it’s not working again. The only way to make it work is to send it again to the render queue all over again from scratch.

I changed my screen to not go to sleep now, but this is definitely a first, I’ve never seen the screen going to sleep affecting my renders, in fact most nights I set up nigh long renders and put the display to sleep myself.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.
D.

[David Cabestany]

Did you shoot against green screen? If so you can make an alpha or luma matte and reveal it using an ink bleed or something of the like, you would still have to probable animate the position of the bleeds but it’s less work than manually animating a mask.

[David Cabestany]

Crap. Definitely not the answer I was looking for.

One las question, did you purge the ram cache using the secret menu in the preferences or stopping your project, emptying the folder and restarting it again?

Thanks a lot everyone for your help.

[David Cabestany]

It’s the original internal ssd drive from my imac, originally I had 69 gb but I reduced it to 50gb, I need to clean up that drive to expand it more.