After Effects stalls and softlocks when rendering a movie file

[Thomas26342091hhu8]

Recently I've tried to render some movies with the same codec/format that I usually do. But now, the render progress will only reach a few seconds and then it'll softlock completely. I've even tried rendering movies at a smaller resolution, and even reducing the resolution of my source videos, but same problem keeps happening. I've tried to render old projects again that before had no problem rendering, and those freeze up too.

I have 8GB of RAM, would expanding that to 16 or 32 help at all?

[ToolfarmJP]

Would you delete the old cache?

Edit menu > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache

[Mylenium]

I agree with Mr. Toolfarm. Could well be that your disks are simply getting full. I'd also manually dig into the system't temp folders and your Adobe folders for other temp files. That said, of course your system doesn't meet the current minimum system requirements, but whether adding more RAM would improve anything is doubtful. It would proabably be more useful if you provided exact system info, details about the project, render settings and so on as well as the pertinent render logs/ render info.

Mylenium

[Thomas26342091hhu8]

I'm not sure about specs, but as I said before, I was rendering movies without a problem until recently. I tried purging the disk drives as suggested, and it helped a little bit, but it still chokes after about a minute's worth of rendered footage. I've tried reducing the preview window to 1.5% size and it helped a little bit more but nothing significant. 

As for output format it's just the default settings. I've never had to fiddle around with them before to get my stuff to render, and what I'm attempting now is much less complex than previous successful renders.

Is there anything else I can do to get it working the way it was before?

[Mylenium]

Sorry, but you really need to be specific. What does "just using default settings" even mean? H.264? Uncompressed MOV? What comp sizes and content? What exact system specs? Is multiframe rendering used? Hardware acceleration in AE and/ or AME? All this stuff matters and only precise info can help us to possibly help you.

Mylenium

[Thomas26342091hhu8]

Processor: Intel Core i5-7400 @ 3.00 GHz 3.00 GHz 

Installed RAM: 8.00 GB

System type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor 

Windows specifications

Edition: Windows 10 Home

Version: 21H2

OS build: 19044.2006

Display adapters: NIVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

That's all I could find for specs. As for video:

Source videos:

Resolution: 1280 × 720

Format: mkv

Encoder: NVENC

Output video:

Output module: Lossless

Format: AVI

Channels: RGB

Depth: Millions of colors

Color: Premultiplied (Matted)

Video Codec: none (other settings for this field are DV, DVNTSC, etc, but I'm not publishing for TV)

Resolution: 1280 × 720

That's all I can scrape together,  hope this sheds some light for you 

[Mylenium]

Have you considered running your MKV through Handbrake to demux it to regular MP4/ MP2 streams or whatever they may be? Other than that I suspect an issue with concurrent use of your NVidia encoder/ decoder as that would be affected by AE's hardware acceleration. Any changes to your graphics driver or screen configuration recently?

Mylenium

[Thomas26342091hhu8]

Haven't made any changes to my display or graphics card, no.

What exactly is demuxing?