[Greg Digenti]

Sorry for the double post on this, but I posted it as a response to Ben’s comment, so I wanted to put it in the right place:

1) Do you get any error message?

Yes, something like “Output module has stopped responding. It may be damaged and you may have to restart After Effects to render again.” That’s not verbatim, but it didn’t seem to me to be helpful, because the file isn’t damaged in my opinion, because it WILL render, and it’s happening across many other AE files. I think something else is at play here.

2) Can you render them losslessly without sound?

I’m not sure if I’ve actually tried that. I’ve tried rendering with all the effects turned off, all lights turned off, and neither worked. I’ll try tonight with the sound off.

3) What format is the audio? Does it help if you transcode it to another format? CS5 had a bug with AIFF support — have you run all the updates?

I’ll have to check the sound format as well, I was just using default sound but set to a really low resolution since the sound isn’t final. I’m fairly certain I’m up to date, I’ll check that to be sure as well. That probably should have been the first thing I checked.

Thanks,
Greg

[Greg Digenti]

@Ben:

1) I don’t think it’s a corrupt file, because I can render it out fine if I do it as an image sequence. Plus, like I said, these are in completely different AE files and always at 123 frames? Why 123 frames if there’s a corrupt file? It seems to only be happening on comps longer than 400 frames, but I’m not absolutely positive on this, I’ve only just noticed this. And I’m rendering LOSSLESSLY, so compression can’t be the issue. Plus, when I render as JPEG encoded mov files, it seems to work fine.

2) My computer isn’t going to sleep, I have all of the energy saving preferences turned off. Plus, it’s getting to frame 123 in just a few minutes and I’m sitting there watching it many times and moving the mouse around on my own.

@ Walter:

1) Do you get any error message?

Yes, something like “Output module has stopped responding. It may be damaged and you may have to restart After Effects to render again.” That’s not verbatim, but it didn’t seem to me to be helpful, because the file isn’t damaged in my opinion, because it WILL render, and it’s happening across many other AE files. I think something else is at play here.

2) Can you render them losslessly without sound?

I’m not sure if I’ve actually tried that. I’ve tried rendering with all the effects turned off, all lights turned off, and neither worked. I’ll try tonight with the sound off.

3) What format is the audio? Does it help if you transcode it to another format? CS5 had a bug with AIFF support — have you run all the updates?

I’ll have to check the sound format as well, I was just using default sound but set to a really low resolution since the sound isn’t final. I’m fairly certain I’m up to date, I’ll check that to be sure as well. That probably should have been the first thing I checked.

Thanks,
Greg

[Greg Digenti]

I have tried the Secret rendering option, with no luck.

And again, I was hoping to figure out why this is happening so that I can fix it. I have too much to render to render everything out and figure out which ones didn’t work and then have to render those out twice, plus I don’t see why I should have to resort to workarounds when AE should be able to render out simple 500 frame comps with sound.

[Greg Digenti]

Thanks for the input, but I’m not really looking for long workarounds, I’m trying to figure out WHY this is happening — since obviously I should be able to render out a 500-frame comp — so that I can fix whatever is going wrong and just render out normally.

Anyone have any non-workaround thoughts on the subject?

[Greg Digenti]

I can render frame 123 by itself, and image sequences don’t seem to fail as readily. But the director asked for me to include sound so he can line them up when editing (I created the AE graphics with the rough cut behind them for timing). And when I bring the image sequences back into AE and try to render Losslessly with the sound, they STILL fail at the same place!

One thing I just realized is that it seems to be failing on clips that are longer than 400 frames. That’s not very long, but all of these are very short segments and I haven’t done a lot of lossless rendering in the past, so I haven’t had to troubleshoot this issue before.

Maybe I just need a new system.

[Greg Digenti]

Wow, perfect. Thanks Dan!

[Greg Digenti]

By “current pin” I meant the pin that the expression is attached to. Like if you add the expression “thisLayer.name” to the Source Text modifier of a text layer, the text will change to the name of the current layer, or the layer that the expression is within.

See, I have many layers in a comp, each layer has multiple pins on them, and each pin has an expression that links them to a null. Each null has been renamed so it matches the name of the pin that will link to it.

The expression on each pin is currently this:

Z = thisComp.layer(“name of null”);
fromWorld(Z.toWorld(Z.anchorPoint));

But I have to change “name of null” to the name of the null that the pin should link to. I was thinking that if I could get the name of the current pin, every single pin in the comp could have the same expression.

[Greg Digenti]

Hi Dan, thanks for your help. Well, I had already made adjustments to the other script which allowed me to adjust the speed and radius of the circle (which I left out of my post because it seemed as though it would only confuse the issue), it’s just the angle of rotation that I’m having a problem with. Imagine rotating a ring shape in space, where the center always remains constant… that’s what I need to do.

Also, Particle Playground uses three separate coordinates, so I need to have three different scripts to figure out x, y, and z. But mainly it’s the fact that it’s 3-dimensional is the reason I’m having such trouble with the expression, and it looks like your expression is 2-dimensional.

BTW, I tried applying your script to test it, and I don’t even see the particles within the frame of the layer.

[Greg Digenti]

Wait, never mind! How strange, the first time I viewed this thread, there was a lot of things missing from your code, then when I re-loaded the page, the missing parts showed up! Must be a Cow bug. Works great, thanks!

[Greg Digenti]

This seems like it could have been what I was looking for in my attempts to slow a rotation, but there seems to be a lot wrong with it. There isn’t an opening curly bracket, or a closing parenthesis, and one line is “while (f” and just ends like that.