After effect RAM crash

[divine_whirl82145]

Hi,

I have an issue when using Ae. I regulary have the message "After Effects: Out of memory".

These last days, I used to open the Windows task manager while using Ae to check the memory usage.

It is around 40-60% all the time, but sometimes there's a peak exeeding 90% and that's when AE crashes with multiple error messages. When it's happening, I'm not doing anything particular that would eat more ram, It may even happen when an Ae project is open but I'm not working actively on it.

Sometimes it even make the computer crashes, my 3 monitors turn black, and eventually only one turns on again and windows don't detect the other 2 aynmore. I have to turn off and on the computer to solve that (and sometimes it doesn't even work...)

I have 128Go ram, a GTX 1060 super.

I tried to disable almost eveything on Ae, multi-frame rendering, gpu accleration, increase / decrease allocated ram, empty cache folder... Still the same problem. As if an unkown process was randomly running and eating all the ram left.

Any idea of how to solve that ?

Thanks !

[ToolfarmJP]

Would you launch Task Manager and check the heavy loading task?

[jefubbudu]

have you tried turning off hardware acceleration? I have no clue how Adobe manages it, but many softwares requre the entire scene/working set to load into VRAM. A lot of Out Of Memory errors in blender only exist when GPU is turned on.

[fluxophile]

This is precisely the same problem I'm experiencing. Full crash, black screens, and I have to pray I'll get the display back to save and safely restart, but sometimes it just doesn't come back on until a hard reboot. I've been dealing with this on PC ever since I began my AE journey professionally in AE23.

Anything, even as simple as a couple shapes or text layers animating when zoomed in at 100% scale, or a 1080p video clip being played back in preview (MP4 or MOV, no difference) with a text layer, can trigger a crash, and it's not always predictable when it'll happen. No crash report or logs, just a persistent "Out of Memory" dialogue box popping up, and the GPU just crashes, all screens go black, and monitors/peripherals are disabled so I am forced to reboot the system.

Scrubbing too fast through a timeline with footage is one of the most common causes, and I am now extremely paranoid about delicately moving the playhead for fear of crashing. Clicking around in the timeline doesn't seem to trigger the issue at all, nor Ctrl+left/right arrow to go frame-by-frame, it's always during playback.

SPECS:

- Windows 11, latest update as of 01/07/2025 (though doesn't seem to be a factor, as this has happened across many Windows 11 updates.)

- GPU: RTX 3070 laptop

- CPU: Ryzen 7 5800H

- 32GB RAM

- Lenovo Legion 5 Pro Laptop

- Latest NVIDIA Studio GPU Driver 566.36

- No issues running any other programs at high intensity - poorly optimized games, TouchDesigner with multiple 4K video streams and many effects, editing in DaVinci, Blender/Octane etc. Everything else is completely stable.

MORE CONTEXT/SETTINGS:

- AE 25.1, 24.6.4, 23.6.2, all of the major ones I could try, no difference. 25.1 is a more pleasant experience overall with the UI overhaul, I was sad this is still an issue.

- No other major programs running

- as much as 26GB of 32GB dedicated to AE

- OS + AE running on one internal SSD, 50GB-100GB AE Disk Cache living on a separate internal SSD (both faster than external)

- GPU or Software video processing, no difference

- Multiframe Rendering or not, no difference

- Purging cache delays it slightly, but ultimately makes no overall difference

- This virtually never happened on my M3 Pro Macbook with 36GB RAM while I was still able to work from that machine in AE24.
- Sometimes, when the GPU seems to be getting hit particularly hard and the display turns back on, the whole Windows UI will be scaled up by like 100%, and all my text, programs, app icons, etc. will be huge. (Which is why I assume it's the GPU crashing.) Sometimes the desktop wallpaper will be black, and AE will still be open, but extremely temperamental and liable to crash the GPU again if I try interacting without restarting.

Seems like on Windows, AE is not capable of continuously clearing the cache quickly enough for whatever I'm demanding from it, and something about the RAM communicating with the GPU crashes the whole GPU. But it's confusing why the GPU would crash even when I disable it and use Mercury Software Only.

[fluxophile]

So far, I've found a possible solution/trigger: only allow AE to use enough RAM that you can confidently provide it - for the remainder, note RAM usage and add some amount of buffer. Conflict between AE's RAM allotment and all other processes demanding RAM leads to the crash.

With 32GB of RAM, I realized that even though I had assigned ~ 6GB of RAM to the rest of the computer, it may not be enough for all non-AE processes (I thought it would automatically de-prioritize or suspend other processes, but looks like Windows 11 itself takes a solid chunk of memory and can't be squashed down further.) I usually close all other heavy programs before working in AE, like web browsers and other non-essential graphics software.

Ran my machine for ~ 5-10 minutes with only support and background programs running (Nvidia control panel, LogiOptions for mouse, etc.), and take note of the max RAM in use. Then, add 1GB. That's how much to dedicate to other processes. I saw an idle max around 8GB, added 1GB for safety, and let AE use 23GB. That's it.

Adobe: maybe you should make it clearer to AE users that if they assign AE more RAM than what the system could potentially have available, and if those other programs suddenly demand more RAM competing with AE's allotment, it's liable to crash the program or system (in my case, seems like a RAM crash leads to a GPU crash.) The "Memory Details" window within Memory & Performance led me to believe that my RAM assignment was somehow letting AE safeguard that RAM for itself and dynamically change the RAM priority of various other processes. Instead, this "RAM reserved" setting really only seems to put a hard cap on the amount of RAM that AE is allowed to use, but doesn't actually do any intelligent RAM management ensuring AE is stable.

Is there anything being done to investigate how to keep AE stable (even if it can't be highly performant) with dynamic RAM load from other programs? Seems pretty foundational. I'd much rather AE slow down when things get cramped rather than crash my whole system and sometimes corrupt my AEP.

My solution seems to be stable when I'm not working in any other intensive programs, but if I need to navigate and cross-work with a big Illustrator or Photoshop project, where the RAM demand can fluctuate? Very risky.

[fluxophile]

To make it clearer: calling it "RAM reserved for other applications" implies that AE is somehow actually limiting how much RAM they consume, when it's really more about the max amount of RAM you'd allow AE to use.

[fluxophile]

May have a solution for you OP: With AE closed, observe how much RAM your system is liable to use, and add 1-2GB (or more) as a buffer. Assign that as your "RAM reserved for other applications" - it's probably higher than what you assigned previously.

e.g. You could tell AE to reserve 4GB for other programs, but if they end up using 8GB, AE will still try to take more than what's available and lead to a crash. (That's my working theory, anyway.) That would also explain why this crash can sometimes happen with AE idle, if other programs suddenly try taking more RAM than AE lets them.