aerender.exe crashes using certain effects

[Roadrunner2005]

Hi,

After many hours of testing we have discovered that aerender.exe is unstable with certain effects. Note, this has only been an issue since moving to AE2018. The effects we have found unstable so far...

Fast Blur (Legacy)

Fast Box Blur

Simple Choker

Directional Blur

If a basic comp is created using any of these effects (or combination of), and rendered by command line (aerender.exe), the comp causes aerender.exe to become very unstable. However, we have also discovered that these crashes depend on the amount of VRAM (GPU RAM) that is free on the system. On my system if the VRAM goes over 60-70% (which I can force by opening several images in Photoshop) then aerender.exe will render a few frames and fail every time. No error is given, even using the "-v ERRORS_AND_PROGRESS" flag. With the VRAM level back down to 50% or less, the renders always work.

Command line used:

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2018\Support Files\aerender.exe" -project "D:\test\AE2018_CrashTest folder\AE2018_CrashTest.aep" -comp "test" -s 0 -e 200 -output  "D:\test\CrashTest\test_[#####].png"

There is clearly a VRAM memory issue in regard to these specific effects, causing an instability in the aerender.exe

AE 2018 (15.1.1), Windows 10 x64 Pro (16299.402), Nvidia GTX-770 4GB (Driver 391.35), Intel i7-7700, 32GB DDR4.

[Mylenium]

The curse of GPU acceleration...

Mylenium

[Jose Panadero]

Try to deactivate the GPU acceleration in File > Project Settings. Under Video Rendering and Effects try to use Mercury Software Only. Test the render in command line and tell us if this works.

[Roadrunner2005]

Thanks for the suggestion Jose. However, aerender.exe does not respect anything set in the Project Settings. It does not even care what is set in the main AE Prefs. It does it's own thing that you have little control over, apart from a few command line options (Non of which allow you to disable the GPU render).

[Roadrunner2005]

Today we discovered yet another built-in effect with the same issue...

Channel Blur

[ericmlevy]

Hey, I’m curious to hear if you’ve discovered anything new about these crashes. I suspected VRAM or the GPU was behind similar crashes using command line rendering.

[Alan_AEDScripts]

Ok so after having this same issue, and eliminating all the above. I found a script was trying to exectute command id :Save RAM Preview... = 2125;

I meticulously went through everything, so I know this command is disabled in 2018, I must have been testing it or something. So this was executed at startup and caused issues with using aerender.exe fluidly.

I have reproduced it etc. so the aerender script will fail with those errors each time and crash, then I removed that call to "Save RAM Preview" in the startup script and 

it is all back to normal now, but I have had those "openvr" error in the console,  for as long as I remember but it starts rendering fine anyway.

Might be of some help to somebody.