[Stephen Ondik]

Walter, If you don’t mind me asking…Does your shop also use a TerraBlock? The reason I ask is because we’ve been in contact with both adobe & facilis, and still can’t come to the conclusion as to which way we should be mounting volumes on the PC side. We believe it makes more sense to mount under the C:\Volumes, but adobe has said that we need to mount them as separate drives with distinct drive letters. When we mount under C:\Volumes premiere pro works and reconnects great, and under specific drive letters nothing auto connects. AE is definitely a different beast when it comes to reconnecting, but we’d assume if premiere works this way then it should be the way we try to troubleshoot. If you use the TB how do you mount volumes on the PCs?

[Stephen Ondik]

Hi Matthew.

We’re using AE 2014.0.2 on the PC (Win 10) and the TB client is 6.5.5, the TB server (win7 pro) is 6.5.0. The Macs (10.10.4) are on AE 2014.2 TB version 6.5.0 and some 6.5.5. We’ve also tried opening with AE 2015 but still no luck.

The issue with reconnecting files has semi-resolved itself. Now the only thing that won’t reconnect automatically, OR manually is the footage not on the same drive as the project. Most of our footage lives on drives specific to location. ie Europe, USA, etc. After effects will only reconnect to to footage stored on the Project drive. When we try to manually “replace footage” it gives us the error that the footage cant be created or found, even though we point it directly to the clip.

Premiere pro does not have this issue. It automatically finds all the clips from various drives and reconnects them properly, no need for even manually relinking them. It must be something with the way that AE handles file paths. Must be different than the way premiere pro does.

Any help or insight is always appreciated!

[Stephen Ondik]

Thank you for the response Walter. I’ve sent out an email to our contact at Facilis. Hopefully we hear back soon. Also, I failed to mention in the post that when we try to manually replace a clip, the error comes back for a completely different clip. ie if I’m trying to reconnect a file named “flag.png” it will throw the error for “belizebookcover.jpeg” saying it can’t be created or found.

[Stephen Ondik]

Doug,

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

-Stephen

[Stephen Ondik]

Matt,

I wanted to let you and anyone else with this issue know that lowering the multisampling, as you suggested, fixed the issue. We raised super-sampling to improve the anti-aliasing and it made it thru a night of renders. It’s certainly unfortunate that element does not support dual GPUs, hopefully they’ll update to include this in the future.

Thanks again everyone for your help.

[Stephen Ondik]

Matt,

We have been successful in rendering out full res (1920×1080) from the 6500×4800 comp on the older mac pro. It has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 6gb card installed in it. The newer mac pro also has 6gb of Vram, but it’s split between two 3gb cards, not sure if there’s a difference vs 6gb from one card…We’re going to try turning Multi-Sampling down to see if we can render full on the new mac. Strange the older one doesn’t have this issue which is why our hunch is it’s between Element and the FIRE PRO D500s.

Is there a way to purge cache from video cards in AE before a render. I know purging gets rid of cache files, but does anything get cached in Vram? The reason I ask is we’ve opened up the same comp a few different times, without changing any settings and render an element portion. Sometimes it crashes, and sometimes it doesn’t when rendering this section. Doesn’t seem to be a reason as to why it sometimes works.

Thanks again.

[Stephen Ondik]

OK,
AE crashed again last night while running the JPEG sequence. After looking at the JPEGs we now know that its element that’s causing the problem as the last JPEG that rendered was right before the element layer. This morning we tried to render out a small portion of the element layer section and it crashed immediately.

We left a half res render (quicktime) on our older mac pro with an Nvidia card, and it finished properly. So it seems like there’s an issue with the element plugin & the ATI cards in the newer mac pro?

Some other information about these comps I should have mentioned previously they are 6500×4800 in size, that we’re rendering to full (1920×1080) or half (960×540).

In the element section where it’s crashing there’s two groups, one with 5 elements & 1 with 1 element (sometimes we turn off some of these & only use 3, or 4 depending on the script). In the comp we tried to render last night there were 4 active where it crashed. There’s other sections where element is being used, that DO render fine, and there’s no more than 4 elements on screen in those sections as well.

We’re running some other tests on the element layers, turning some off & seeing if we can get thru rendering the section.

here’s a link to a screen grab of the crash report if it may be of any use:

https://imgur.com/pcobv9M

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

View post on imgur.com

[Stephen Ondik]

The OSX version we’re running is 10.10.4.

When we leave the renders going, AE is the only thing open. We have been able to complete the render on quarter resolution. it takes around an hr and a half (we’ve run these during the day). Overnight renders are usually run at half res, & sometimes full res, but have yet to complete one without a crash. We’re going to run a full res image sequence (jpeg) overnight, and see if we’re crashing during the section where element is being used, or any other plugins. I’ll report back tomorrow morning with the results.

Thanks again for all your help with this!

[Stephen Ondik]

We have the most current version of Element installed (2.2.1).

Regarding airflow, the Mac Pro sits on a desk with plenty of room.

[Stephen Ondik]

The project is currently using these effects.

Effects used: 28
Effect: 3D Camera Tracker
Effect: Alpha Cleaner
Effect: Box Blur
Effect: Camera Lens Blur
Effect: Channel Blur
Effect: Color Balance
Effect: Corner Pin
Effect: Curves
Effect: Drop Shadow
Effect: Element
Effect: Fill
Effect: FL Out Of Focus
Effect: Gaussian Blur
Effect: Gradient Ramp
Effect: Grid
Effect: Hue/Saturation
Effect: KC Denoiser
Effect: Keylight (1.2)
Effect: Levels
Effect: Mesh Warp
Effect: Mosaic
Effect: Optics Compensation
Effect: Paint
Effect: Particular
Effect: RSMB
Effect: Set Channels
Effect: Smooth Screen
Effect: Stroke