After Effects 2023 crashes when rendering with adjustment-layer effects enabled

After Effects 2023 crashes when rendering with adjustment-layer effects enabled

Hi Adobe community,

I'm having a serious rendering problem in After Effects 2023 and I can't figure out what's causing it.

My project is a 1080×1080, 60 FPS edit. When I render normally, After Effects eventually gets stuck/crashes around a specific frame. I also experienced RAM-preview glitches where some footage would flicker/warp or display incorrectly.

I tested the project by disabling the effects on my adjustment layers, and the exact same frame renders successfully when the effects are disabled.

So I've confirmed that one or more effects on my adjustment layers are causing the rendering problem. However, these effects are an important part of the edit, so simply turning them off isn't a solution.

My PC has:

• After Effects 2023

• Windows 10/11

• 8 GB RAM

• NVIDIA GPU

• 60 FPS composition

• 1080×1080 resolution

I've already tried:

• Restarting After Effects

• Clearing/purging the cache

• Rendering the problematic frame by itself

• Pre-composing the layers

• Rendering through Media Encoder

• Closing other applications to free RAM

When the effects are enabled, After Effects can become stuck or crash with:

“AfterFX.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.”

When the effects are disabled, the problematic frame renders normally.

My main question is:

How can I keep these adjustment-layer effects while fixing the crash/rendering issue?

Is there a recommended way to troubleshoot which effect is causing the crash without removing the effects from the project? Could this be related to GPU acceleration, third-party plugins, memory limitations, cache corruption, or an After Effects 2023 compatibility issue?

I'd really appreciate specific troubleshooting steps, especially anything that would allow me to keep the effects intact.

Thanks.