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freegravity
Participating Frequently
November 13, 2025
Question

AE on Tahoe super slow and causing "force quit" dialogue to pop during render

  • November 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 112 views

I've been up all night trying to render a 3:30 animation. Had to render in 15/20sec increments and then stitch together in Premiere Pro because it kept causing the "force quit" dialogue to pop—which has never happened before, usually you have to initiate a "force quit"—saying there is no more memory left, shown to be using 663.35GB, which is more than I have. 

 

This is the first project I've done since updating to Tahoe. Mac specs: M2 Max, 96GB RAM. Using AE latest version 25.5, even uninstalled and installed the last 25.4 to see it that would fix it. 

 

Also, while animating, the preview was so slow I couldn't get the timing down. I don't do a ton of animation projects but have been using AE since 2015 and have never had an issue while working, sometimes it would slow a bit while rendering, but this is ridiculously slow. So slow I was just scrubbing to see if it was about right. Even using the lowest quality preview. Then rendering a 3:30 project was going to take 3.5hrs. This is insane! I did a 15minute animation 2 years ago with mostly the same types of animations and never had an issue with preview playback and the rendering was done well under 30minutes. I wannas say it was only like 15-ish minutes. 

 

I tried all the purging of memory and disk caches, used it on the macs internal SSD as well as on an attached SSD. Changed locaction of caches, purged the database. Never experienced anything like this. I'm so frustrated right now. I suspect it could be Tahoe.  

 

Any help would be appreciated! 

1 reply

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freegravityAuthor
Participating Frequently
November 13, 2025

Looks like I have found the issue. It seems to be a combo of 2 things. I had some audio files for voiceover and some screenrecording video files in the animation. With that I was using "Cinema 4D" for some flip animations. I deleted all the video and audio files, then switched to "Classic 3D". I was able to render the full video in less that a minute—as expected—and no errors. Also, the playback while editing was snappy. 

 

Now the question is: are all audio/video files going to be impossible to incorporate into a project, or was it these particular files. The audio were recorded on an iPhone, not sure how the screenrecordings were recorded. Do I have to convert these to something else? Any advice on having audio/video along with animations in one project? Thanks in advance. 

nishu_kush
Community Manager
nishu_kushCommunity Manager
Community Manager
November 14, 2025

Thanks for making the detailed thread and sharing the update.

I believe it was these specific files. iPhone recorded media and screen recordings are often recorded with variable frame rates, which After Effects sometimes has trouble with. The best way to fix this problem is to transcode the media.

Hope it helps. Moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for troubleshooting.


Thanks,
Nishu

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freegravityAuthor
Participating Frequently
November 14, 2025

Thanks for the reply, I've saved as to experiment. I'll see if transcoding helps.

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