After Effects rendering POORLY on MacStudio Ultra 128 RAM since upgrading to SONOMA 14.1.1

Good idea. I will run tests asap. When I bought the MacStudio M1 Ultra, it worked perfectly from the first day. No other issues. Perhaps things have clogged it up over time. I'll run diagnostics soon and report back. 

This definitely sounds system related then. When you first got the Mac Studio was there any issues when installing the system or during any updates? if so it could be down to corrupted disk issues, not sure it it was a bad batch - not a hardware issue just the software installation. This was resolved by someone I know who had the issue was a full wipe and reinstall. This fault was detected in disk utility in recovery mode.

I'd recommend a diagnostic run first if you haven't done so just to rule out other hardware issues. You can do this by holding down the power button on the Mac until you get the recovery options come up, then press Command D this will bring up the diagnostic. This doesn't do any harm, but will run through a full hardware check.

Thanks to everyone who assisted with suggestions. So far, this is what I am suspecting:  Sonoma did put a strain on the M1 Ultra MacStudio with 128 Gb of memory. The issue I reported has not been resolved. However, due to your kind suggestions below, I conducted a series of tests. At this stage, it seems that the problem is related to memory of sorts. It might not be so much an After Effects / Adobe problem. Hard to confirm. But I am leaning at this stage to thinking that the MacStudio and Sonoma have changed behaviour, and some basic video replays, even very simple ones, especially when scrubbing an MP4 using Quicktime, is causing the massive pixelation issues. Sad for such a proweful device, that a simple video cannot refresh. I will keep experimenting to see if there is a solution. Cheers. 

@EnthusiastOfTheMind 

What file format was the source footage?  Some formats hold up well enough while working in After Effects, but not when being compressed again during export.   Pre-rendering is always a good strategy if the combination of CPU speed and Disk Cache capacity and speed are not meeting expected performance levels or if the source footage is not holding up.

Thanks I'll look into that and test it. Cheers 

@jn81265522 

99GB is not a lot of space for the Disk Cache.  For improved performance, choose a disk cache folder on a fast hard drive or SSD seperate from your footage and allocate as much space as possible.  

Good luck. The only similar scenario I had to this was down to a reversed video clip, which the disc cache corrupted every time. Either I had to purge the disc cache before opening the project and the go straight to render, or to fix the issue permanently to bake effected comp to video and reimport.

Hello, I will try this type of senario. I always do Purge the cache. It hits 99 Gb in no time. So I clear it. I also press caps-lock when rendering to avoid any burden to render to screen. I will however close everthing and open again before a clean render, and knock it back to Quarter res. Everone has been helpful. Sadly there are endless tests to run. It is a mystery that reminds me of the good old days of wasting days of trying to make things compatible. I had more faith in Apple and Adobe. Perhaps they are not talking to each other these days. I will report back after a few more experiments. 

I can't say I've had the same issue with my M2max based Mac (OS14.1.1) within after effects. However I frequently find that render errors are due to cache errors, even though they appear pre rendered in the timeline cache fine. It tends to happen more so if the preview is set to Full,  (half, thirds and quarters aren't used for final rendering) If you close the project and purge the disc cache then reopen does that make any difference?

I tend to use a dedicated external ssd drive (must be APFS formatted) than using the system drive (due to the constant read writes). You can also manually purge the drive by deleting its contents.

If the source is ProRes, I'd find it very unusual for it to behave differently with Intel hardware under macOS Monterey 12.7.1 and on Apple Silicon under macOS Sonoma 14.1.1, but it's not impossible.