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CaptnCapsLock
CaptnCapsLock
Known Participant
January 21, 2022
Question

Is it possible to work on a file in AE 22 and queue render in AME 21?

  • January 21, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 621 views

I've been running into a bunch of render hangs in Media Encoder 22 with a few of my projects, and I've been wondering if there's a way I can export a project from After Effects 22 (just what I've been working in), and queue the render in AME 21, or really any supported older, and more stable version.

It doesn't look like there is any option to choose which version to favor if I have them both installed, and it will automatically try to queue the export in AME 22 even when it's uninstalled? (I get error 5027::12 when I try.)

Is this an option to work between versions, or do I need to work from both AE 21 and AME 21?

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1 reply

D
David Arbor
Inspiring
January 25, 2022

While it may be possible (I have done this before), it's not a good idea. Dynamic Link should have matching versions, which means AE 2022 and AME 2022. If you go back to AE 2021 you'll also lose the huge performance gains of multi-frame rendering (something only AME 2022 and AE 2022 can use). 

 

I would try diagnosing the hangs in AME 2022 first. Can you be more descriptive with what's happening? Is it Dynamic Link that's hanging so your AE comp never even shows up in AME, is your render only partially completeing before hanging, or something else? 

 

Have you tried trashing your AME preferences, and of course, making sure you're using the most up-to-date version of AME. There were issues with Dynamic Link in AME 2022 when it was first released, but patches have fixed that. Even so, people still experienced issues and the solution was to simply restart the computer to clear out any hanging processes, then the patched version worked properly.

CaptnCapsLock
CaptnCapsLockAuthor
Known Participant
January 25, 2022

I think a lot of my issues in AME came from the the size of the files I was working with. My projects started with keying out greenscreen elements from a large ProRes file with Primatte Keyer (which has been the source of many of my AE crashes), and some need some heavy rotoscoping on top of that, plus liberal use of fractal noise and other effects on top of those effects. I've since started optimizing my files as I work by exporting the greenscreened elemets as alpha channels to a PNG sequence, and then dropping them back in.

Sometimes the render would just stop in the middle of rendering (AME) and when I hit the stop button it would freeze up the program (force quit sometimes wouldn't even work), or even sometimes eat up a bunch of RAM and basically force a restart of my system.

I've also had a rough time with the disk cache not clearing when I tried to clear those folders in AE, and it would fill up system memory, even though the cache folders it was indexing were totally empty - that I fixed by changing the cache volume size in AE from 125 down to 100GB, and for some reason that worked.

It's mostly just been a dog's breakfast of issues between AE and AME that I've had to keep troubleshooting as I go, that I think likely just came down to the file sizes - since sharpening up my work flow I've been mostly issue-free.

D
David Arbor
Inspiring
January 25, 2022

That's good to hear. Inefficient frames can definitely be the cause of massive hangs and lags, and it can be even worse when rendering through AME because you have no visual feedback of what's going on. You don't know if something is processing or about to crash.

 

I think I remember a recent bug where disk cache sizes were being ignored, but I thought that was fixed by now. Maybe it is in the public beta only? There might be info on the After Effects UserVoice about that.

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