After Effects crashing

[Sam Mortimore - Westcoast]

Hi guys, I am hoping someone can help.

I have the creative cloud suite and use these daily, but after effects seems to crash routinely, sometime within minutes, some times within about 45 minutes. This will then crash my entire machine, and while some functionality comes back eventually, I have to restart to be able to do anything useful. It always pops up with the same error about running out of memory, but having spoken to my internal IT team, the laptop is more than powerful enough to run this (HP ZBook Firefly G11, 32GB RAM), and i use to run it on a lesser machine perfectly fine. Is there any settings that might be causing this? I'm pulling my hair out!

Thanks!

Sam

[David.Arbor]

Hi @Sam Mortimore - Westcoast, we can help, but we need a lot more information to figure out what's going on.

A few questions:

1. Are you submitting crash reports with your email after the crash? I checked our system and the one tied to this forum account doesn't bring up any reports.

2. Can you post a screenshot of the error about memory?

3. What exact version of AE are you running? From the Help > About After Effects menu, not just the year.

4. What GPU and driver are you running?

5. Is this with a specific project or all projects?

6. Did this recently start happening?

7. Are you using any third-party plug-ins, ScriptUI panels, or CEP extensions?

8. If you are submitting crash reports with the same email, but they're not making it to our system, can you check can you check your cache folder for a folder called "SentryIO-db"?
If you go to Preferences > Media & Disk Cache you'll see the location of your disk cache. Then, if you dig in a little more you'll find "Adobe/After Effects (Beta)/25.0/SentryIO-db'

For example, on my Mac it's located at:"'/Users/darbor/Library/Caches/Adobe/After Effects (Beta)/25.0/SentryIO-db'
It should be a similar location on Windows based on your Cache folder.
Could you please zip this folder and DM it to me? You'll have to send a file sharing link, as our DM system doesn't allow for uploading attachments.

This definitely isn't normal behavior, and with the right information, we should be able to figure out the cause.

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team

[Sam Mortimore - Westcoast]

Thanks for your time David, some answers to your questions:

1) I am not submitting crash reports as it doesnt physically crash the program, it just slows my laptop down to the point where it can't do anything, and usually requires a hard reset as i cant even open task manager. 

2) I have attached 2 screenshots of the error, image 1 appears first, then image 2 once the system is about crash. 

3) I am using version 25.4.0, but i have had this on previous versions and updated the software to see if this would make a difference, which sadly it hasnt.

4) GPU is below:

5) This will happen on any project. Sometimes it will happen quickly, sometimes it takes a bit longer. The system works perfectly fine before the system encounters the error, so if we were to jump on a call now, it would seem like its working fine, until it isnt!

6) This has been ongoing since i was provided my new work laptop, february time this year. 

7) I havent installed anything outside of the download from creative cloud. 

8) N/A im not submitting tickets

[David.Arbor]

Thanks for that info. If you ever got AE to crash, even through the Task Manager, you still might have the local sentry report. It would be great if you could check that path.

Looking at your screenshot, I have a couple guesses— do you have Continuously Rasterize enabled for those Illustrator files, and or perhaps any effects that greatly expand the bounds of your frames? Things like glows with massive radii or Repetile or Motion Tile could be culprits. Your IT department can't really say whether you have enough RAM because they have no idea what kinds of frames you're making. 32 GB is certainly an ample amount, but RepeTile or Motion Tile with incredibly high settings are common culprits for eating up high amounts of RAM. 

There might also be some clues if you can post another screenshot with your Timeline maximized (hit the ` / ~ key below "ESC" while your mouse is hovering over the Timeline) and change your columns back from Modes to Switches. This will let me see as many layers as possible.

And thanks for posting the GPU info. There is a driver update for your GPU, but this warning isn't about VRAM anyway.

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team