Media Encoder Freezes During Render Export From After Effects

Hello and thank you for looking at this post.

Trying to better understand why I am having this issue; I looked a little closer at my setup.

1. My project files are on an installed 8Tb SATA drive with 50% room left available. This is not the boot drive but is inside the Mac Pro. (Promise Pegasus J2i 8TB Internal Storage Enclosure for Mac Pro)
2. The external 1Tb SSD is the scratch disk.
3. I am writing the .MP4 to the same internal SATA drive as the project files.

When it was suggested that there could be a bottleneck with the transfer to the SSD, I looked closer at that drive. It is a scratch disk for all my Adobe apps and has separate folders for Ae and Pr. I do get occasional warnings from Ae that my cache does not have enough available space. I usually go Edit>Purge>All Memory and Disk Cache to correct the issue.

But I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with the SSD itself that could impact this problem and I used Disk Utility to have a look. I started with running First Aid on the SSD. It would not unmount for the first aid, there was an application still using the drive. Looking at Activity Monitor I noticed “aerendercore” was (Not Responding). Although both Ae and Me were closed, there was a remnant of the render remaining in the CPU’s activity. It is possible that quitting Me when the render froze, did not quit all the processes associated with the render. I forced this process to quit and ran first aid, the drive was fine.

I reformatted the SSD scratch disk to remove all folders that the other apps may have used. I launched Ae and, in the Media & Disk Cache preference, increased the Maximum Disk Cache Size to 900GB since it was a 1TB drive. I received a warning that there was not enough space on the drive for that cache size. I tried 750GB, the error occurred again. Ae was happy when I set it to the original 500GB. I am not sure why Ae does not like taking all the space available to it, the drive was freshly reformatted?

Once this was all finished, I restarted Ae. This time it seemed to take a really long time to launch and I could see the spinning beachball of death. I checked the Activity Monitor and it showed Ae as unresponsive. I waited a little longer and it completed the launch but returned an error “Unable to execute script at line 29, a does not have a constructor” I dismissed the warning and Ae started up but did not go to the “Home” screen to select the project I wanted to open.

I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Ae 22.2.1 (Build 3). It seemed to start as expected however, it produced a disk cache error. It would seem that software upgrades do not remember the disc caches settings and I repointed this to the SSD scratch disk.

Next, I tried to render my project again.
1. Energy saver was set to never turn the display off.
2. The screen saver was set to off.
3. I did not do any work on the computer while it was processing.

It froze again.

03/12/2022 10:11:57 AM : Queue Started
- Source File: /Volumes/Working Drive/After Effects Projects/220218 Aquarium Calm/220218 Aquarium Calm_AME/tmpAEtoAMEProject-Aquarium Calm 10 Minutes_5.aep
- Output File: /Volumes/Working Drive/After Effects Projects/220218 Aquarium Calm/Video/Aquarium Calm with Audio v2.mp4
- Preset Used: Custom
- Video: 1920x1080 (1.0), 24 fps, Progressive, 100 (63% HLG, 51% PQ), Hardware Encoding, 00:10:16:17
- Audio: AAC, 320 kbps, 48 kHz, Stereo
- Bitrate: VBR, 1 pass, Target 10.00 Mbps
- Encoding Time: 00:43:23
03/12/2022 10:55:24 AM : Encoding Failed
-------------------------------------
The Operation was interrupted by user

The Activity Monitor shows the “aerendercore” as functioning however I watched the processing time indicators and they did not change for 10 minutes before I ended the process.

I quit Ae and Me and the “aerendercore” is still appearing in the Activity Monitor.

Any suggestions on what else I could try?

I've had the same issue on my M1 MacBook Pro. Sometimes when I send stuff off to AME it doesn't even appear in the queue. I've tried several of the workarounds as well.

Is your Mac falling asleep at some point? I remember hearing screensaver/power saving can force AE to pause and never recover. You can try disabling all power savers and see if that helps.