After Effects keep crashing on render

[Territor]

I keep getting this message of not enough memory available. I have plenty of Gb on the HDD and as you can see I'm using very few memory. Any ideas? Thanks

[Rick Gerard]

You are running out of RAM, not drive space. You have either created a comp that is too large or you are using a memory-intensive effect like a particle system or echo, or time displacement in your project. Without workflow details and screenshots of your comp showing the modified properties of the layers, we have no idea where the problem lies. 

The way for you to troubleshoot the problem is to select all layers, press the U key twice, look for effects that might be using a lot of memory and start turning them off of changing the settings one at a time until the problem is resolved. The way to get some help is to show us or tell us exactly what is going on in the comp.

[Territor]

Hi Rick,

thanks a lot for the quick response. Indeed I have some Luma Key filters, Hue&Sat filters, Curves and blending modes in a 3d comp with camera tracking. What I don't undertand is that in my preference I allocated most of the RAM for AE and I have no other program running at the same time. If AE is telling me that it's using max 60% of the RAM (see pic), how I can still run out of RAM?

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

You should not go into preferences and just allocate all available ram to Adobe. Adobe likes even numbers of GB and so do the other apps. Pick 2 or 4 GB for other apps first and see if that solves the problem. It is completely possible to run out of system resources when rendering, especially if you have motion blur/ lights and shadows, or any kind of time-bending. The reported ram usage is just an average estimate. Come upon a frame that requires more ram than is available and AE will hand up and report the problem before the calculations of ram usage are displayed. 

[Territor]

Thank you very much Rick. Somehow AE didn't allow me to put 2GB for the other applications so I went for 4GB. The allocated memory for AE passed from 11GB to 12GB and the render went smooth till the end.

Thanks

[Rick Gerard]

The odd number of GB available problems comes from the basic design of the buss. To open all available bandwidth, all of the highways have to be open. Throw in an uneven block of memory and you end up with data sharing a highway and that can cause problems.