Affter effects: unable to allocate...

[Pavel Polozhentsev]

My project is very simple: several layers of photoshop and one two-minute video in mp4 format. I'm using the wiggle expression on four layers and using the blend mode (screen) on the video. When I'm trying to render a 2 minute video in mp4 format. I'm getting a stupid error. AE uses all my RAM and stops rendering... How do I fix this?
My specs:
Premiere Pro v24.0.0 (Build 58).
OS: Windows.
CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X.
GPU: RTX 2080s.
RAM: 64.

[nishu_kush]

Hi Pavel,

How much RAM do you have allocated to After Effects in After Effects Preferences? Are you using any effects or any third-party plug-ins? What's the resolution of your comp and media that you're using? Try clearing the media cache. Here's how: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/faq-how-to-clean-delete-or-trash-media-cach...

Looking forward to your response.

Note: Moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for troubleshooting.

Thanks,

Nishu

[jenkmeister]

I'm not sure what version of AE 2023 you are using, but the error message seems to indicate AE needs to allocate a block of 32GB RAM for a single frame. So either an effect you're using or the resolution of the footage is too much.

You could try rendering out a PNG sequence so that if it fails part way through you could continue to export from that point. Once you have the complete PNG sequence, take that back into AE and render that into the H.264 file. 

[Pavel Polozhentsev]

Thanks for the answer. I'll have to use the PNG sequence... and then convert everything to another format. I'm so tired of such problems with After Effect that I'm ready to study Fusion by Blackmagic, even though it's more for compositing than for motion... Simple composition, not a single effect, 64GB of full RAM - easy for After Effects... I even did tests. And it's very funny. The FHD composition is a couple of shapes, and the animation is posed - 30+ GB of RAM... it's very expensive...

[Pavel Polozhentsev]

Thanks for the answer. I briefly mentioned my PC above in the report. As for effects and cache: There are no effects. Only wiggle on camera (position Z) and snow (layer with screen blend mode). Before this I used layers directly from Photoshop. But after the error, I exported all layers to png in 1080... This did not help me. After Effects continues to eat up all my memory... 
Perhaps this is not entirely on topic. But I’m very angry that the After Effect in 2023 is still very unstable, Premier Pro too... and no matter what PC I use, the same problem is everywhere... constant bugs and crashes... in many of my projects . Many are tired of this... Every year Adobe releases cool updates, all sorts of neural networks, new tools for work... this is really cool. But when will the day come when optimization in all Adobe applications can be compared at least with Davinci Resolve? Many people would like this...

[nishu_kush]

Sorry for the frustration, Pavel. We'd love to look into this and get to the bottom of the issue.

Can you reproduce this issue in any other project? Media files used in the project could create such an issue. If possible, share the project file (including media) with us to take a look at. Feel free to DM me the download link.

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,

Nishu

[Pavel Polozhentsev]

Hi, sorry I haven't been in touch for a long time. I would like to inform you that I have found a solution for new versions of AE. And yes, this is in all projects and on two different computers. And so, if you disable the Cache "Frames When Idle", then everything works great. If it turns on AE and tries to eat up all the RAM, it doesn’t matter to him that there are restrictions in the settings.
Thanks for your time, I hope AE does a lot better in the future. Because right now it's just terrible. The old engine simply cannot cope with new updates and loads.

[jenkmeister · Accepted solution]

Cache Frames When Idle will render the current composition in the background, but it does honor the settings for RAM usage. It is simply kicking off rendering frames as though you hit the space bar to preview, there isn't any bypassing of the rest of AE's memory checks. The original error message you showed is very clear that a frame was trying to be rendered that required 32GB of RAM. 

I'm sorry you feel AE is terrible. 

[Pavel Polozhentsev]

I also noticed that if you allocate more disk cache for AE than is free, then during operation, it will simply crash without an error, and it's not immediately clear what's wrong... I had such a problem in the last project, and only after a while did I discover that there is not as much disk space for the cache as I specified in the AE settings. If you lower the value, which will be less than the free space, everything works fine.

Regarding my opinion about the stability of AE.

I think AE is a great program with excellent tools, BUT with very poor optimization. It's no secret that nowadays, not only tools matter, but also the efficiency of their performance. I hope the Adobe team will someday address this and change their focus to quickly improve the optimization as a whole. I also work extensively in Premiere Pro, and it suffers from the same issue. Despite having many new and cool tools, the speed and stability of many functions are lacking. Perhaps this opinion is also influenced by comparisons with other software. I work with programs like UE5, Blender, and Davinci Resolve, where optimization is significantly better than what Adobe offers currently. I understand that much depends on the underlying engines of the program, but I hope Adobe will soon prioritize speed and stability."

Thanks!