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Participating Frequently
August 6, 2025
Question

Mac Studio does not work with Adobe After effects, Constant GPU memory failures when exporting.

  • August 6, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 430 views

WARNING

I recently purchased an expensive new Mac Studio M4 for my work as a motion graphics artist.

 

specs 

PROCESSOR AND GRAPHICS 065-CGWJ M4 MAX

WITH 16C CPU, 40C GPU

MEMORY 065-CGWP 64GB UNIFIED MEMORY

 

 

I needed a reliable, powerful main machine for my work having previoulsy been using a 2017 Imac which has been great for the past 7 years, but started to slow down noticably in the past year or so.

 

I have been using the new Mac Studio machine over these past 2 weeks for some important element 3d/4k work which I began on my old machine. Unfortunately I have been plagued with constant freezes, crashes and GPU memory failures when attempting to render even png sequences from After effects desite paying extra for 40 cores of GPU . . . .(see attached images)

 

 

I have never seen these errors appearing on any project on the much older and less spec 2017 imac in all the years of intense After effects work i put it through, And, moreover did not expect to see errors like this appearing after spending thousands on a new work machine with the above specs. . . . . . . . 

This has led me to having to transfer the project to my much smaller and way less powerful pc laptop, I have had mixed success rendering from, although it often takes many hours to complete.

 

I must admit I feel buyers remorse from this as my work mainly is in After Effects, and hence needed a reliable beast machine to handle some demanding workloads under tight deadlines. 

Since I have been using After Effects with this new machine however, there has been nothing but problems and I despratley need a a remedy for these constant issues.

 

Are these GPU failures due to an optimsation/incompatability between Adobe and Mac Studio ? 

 

Is it an After Effects issue ?

 

 

 

Any help , fixes, workarounds , explanations or advice would be kindly appreciated to resolve this. 

 

 

RK.

2 replies

nishu_kush
Community Manager
Community Manager
August 6, 2025

Hi Russell,

 

Really sorry that's happening to you. We're here to help. Could you share more details about the project you're having issue with? Which effects and third-party plug-ins are used? Are there any media files? If so, could you share their resolution and frame rate? Can you also test if it is happening with this specific project or all of them? The screenshots you shared indicate that your project requires more resources than what is available, so it could be a project optimisation problem. For testing, eliminate if there are any external drives being used. For example, if your media is stored in the external drive, bring it to a local location and link it in the project as well.

Let us know. 


Thanks,
Nishu

Participating Frequently
August 6, 2025

Thank you for your reply, 

I am using element 3d, Plexus and some trapcode glows. 

4k res, 24fps

All project media is on an external drive.

nishu_kush
Community Manager
Community Manager
August 6, 2025

Thanks for sharing the details. For testing, can you disable all your effects and see if that makes any difference? If it does, enable the effects one by one and see which one is causing the issue. If disabling the effects doesn't help, bring your media and project file to the local location and see. I understand this will be time-consuming, but it'll help you narrow down the issue.

Looking forward to your response.


Thanks,
Nishu

takashi vfx
Inspiring
August 6, 2025

After Effects is ram hungry app, so perform better with more rams. Apple slicon shares ram with GPU, so need to watch out how much ram left using After effects. close unused apps, purge All cache etc helps.

also after effects perform the best with really fast single core. try turning off multi-frame rendering. toggle back and forth wiith GPU acceleration and Software only in project setting and make any difference. if you have dedicated cache drive like using external ssd drive to give plenty of disk cache space would help too. some 3rd party plugin have option to select GPU enabled, sometime checking that box really screw up the performance. try toggle on and off and see what works better.

when i was using iMac, i often pram reset before reneder to give fresh empty ram. apple slicon dosen't have that but you could just restart system if you are ready to do really heavy render.

best,

t

Participating Frequently
August 6, 2025

thank you, I will try some of these fixes.