Extractor plugin crashing after effects

[BenD123]

Hi Guys.

I have a serious problem with the latest version of after effects (AE24) but it seems to apply to AE 23 and all version in between as well, the extractor plugin is crashing after effects for fun when applied to EXRs, no matter what i change in the settings after effects just crashes when scrubbing, caching or rendering, this is a serious problem adobe, please sort your software out, this is unusable in its current state.

the only half working solution i have tried so far is turning off multiprocessing so everything takes hours to render now. WTF is going on, CPU is more than powerful enough for this, (Blade 18 ,i9 13950, RTX 4080 96Gb of ram) sort it out adobe this is appaling for"professional software" 

has anyone come across this, anyone know real workaround that isnt using an entirely different piece of software. 

[jenkmeister]

Are you able to share a problematic EXR with us so we can attempt to reproduce the issue?

[BenD123]

Unfortunately not as the EXRs are under an NDA, The issue however is not the EXRs, I have EXRs from other projects that have worked in the past and the same thing happens, if i render with the extractor plugin and multiprocessing turned on it crashes, the problem is not the EXRs, its AE. i have tried reinstalling, using other EXRs, other computers the same things happens

[BenD123]

I can recreate this doing the following in Ae 24 & 23:

Use any EXR sequence with multiple passes
Apply "extractor" to the layer and choose the first pass
Duplicate 2 more times, and adjust the other 2 layers to other passes within Extractor (diffuse shadow etc)
Change opacity to get the right balance
Render or cache now consistently crashes AE if multiprocessing is turned on

this works across 2 computers and 2 versions ofAe with differnent EXR sequences that are completely unrelated and createed years apart. 

AE is the problem

[jenkmeister]

I'm not denying AE is the problem, but we don't have anything to reproduce the issue with. This isn't something we are aware or or have an existing bug written about. So however you can help us with files or materials, that'd be helpful.

[BenD123]

I have downloaded a freely available multi layered EXR on the web and have popped it into a project and uploaded it here (1GB) 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ebnkk3sw61prh9qv5z6ip/EXR-Test-folder.zip?rlkey=uk92n6x04vjmqzgt6za70...

This project crashes consistently when rendering or caching, on reopening AE 24 it says it was indeed "extractor" that has caused the crash. 

[jenkmeister]

Thank you for getting that together. We'll take a look at it and see what needs fixing.

[BenD123]

Any luck on find out out what this could be?

[jenkmeister]

I just checked in on the ticket. Looks like we haven't been able to reproduce internally and your crash is the only record of the issue. Are you using other effects before the Extractor plugin? Do the filenames have any special characters in them? If you create a new comp, bring the EXR into it and apply extractor, does it crash immediately or are there other steps we need to follow?

[BenD123]

No there are no special characters in the footage.

The exrs are the only sequences in the project, it doesnt matter how you bring them in, what version or computer, this happens over multiple versions on 2 entirely separate computers.  This happens in software only mode and in GPU cuda mode but only happens with multiprocessing turned on.

Surely the thousands of crash reports that get sent through register somewhere on your systems. 

[jenkmeister]

Yep, those crash reports get through to us. You are the only person to have hit this crash best we can tell.

[BenD123]

Very interesting thanks for the info, do the crash reports mention what or why it's crashing

[jenkmeister]

Do you see any error dialogs appearing with something like "After Effects error: Cannot find image channel" or "After Effects error: file --- cannot be imported — files of type “” cannot be used as sequences." 

Those error messages are being reported shortly before the crash. 

[BenD123]

unfortunately not, i get zero errors before the crash, i just get the ("Sorry an error has occoured" AfterFX.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close). Currently trying with different EXRs, different multiprocessing settings, GPU settings colour settings. every time it results in the same crash

[BenD123]

I really have tried I can think of everything now,

I've tried footage on different drives
Different footage
Hardware accelerated comps on and off
Different AE versions
Different colours Spaces
8Bpc 16 BPc 32 BPC
Cuda on and Off
restricting the RAM and CPU usage
Changing comp and footage frame rates
Starting entirely new compositions and project
Importing the EXRs in different ways
Updated Drivers
Updated BIOS
With and without Disk Cache

The follow these steps as you would comp any EXR

Use any EXR sequence with multiple passes
Apply "extractor" to the layer and choose the first pass
Duplicate 3 more times, and adjust the other 3 layers to other passes within Extractor (diffuse shadow etc)
Change opacity to 25% on the 3 top layers
Render or cache now consistently crashes AE if multiprocessing is turned on

Each and every time I get the same crash, the only way to stop it, is to disable Multiframe rendering.
Is there anything else I can try becuase at the moment this software does not seem fit for purpose

[jenkmeister]

Very strange. We've tried those repro steps and the project you supplied and it all plays back fine for us. We'll keep trying though.

[jenkmeister]

Is there any chance you might have installed the Extractor plugins from a separate download than via installing from AE? There are open-source versions on the internet that may or may not match what we are shipping in AE currently. 

[BenD123]

unfortunately not, It would be great if that was the case, easy fix. The job has now finished and I got around it by just disabling multiframe rendering and going about it that way, wasnt ideal, but it worked. I appreciate you downloading all the files and trying to help, you've been super responsive even when i've been clearly very irratated. Thanks for the support regardless

[Collin28009184gek7]

are their any updates on this? this is also a problem for me in the same way BenD123 describes. The problem started with AE 2023 the ones before didn't have this problem.