After Effects Won't Render Final Frame of Composition

[Adam McKenzie]

Hi,

I thought I'd ask here if anyone is having the same issue as I am. After Effects has suddenly stopped rendering the final frame of any composition I render.

For example, I render a lot of 30 second videos at 25fps. The videos should be 750 frames in length. Instead, once I render them, they are only 749 frames. Super annoying.

Has anyone else had this issue or know how to solve it.

Weirdly, if I export using Adobe Media Encoder, it renders the full 750 frames.

Thanks!

[Dave_LaRonde]

It could be due to a simple error in counting.

In AE, comps begin with frame ZERO -- thus, a 10-frame video would have frames 0-9, and a 750-frame video would have frames 0-749.

[Rick Gerard]

Listen to Dave. The last frame in a composition is visible when the CTI is at the start of that frame. It has not played back yet. After that frame has played back the timeline shows no images because the video is over. If the CTI starts at zero the timeline always ends after the last frame plays back, but the CTI (current time indicator) parks at the start of that last frame by default.

I hope this makes sense. It takes some head scratching for most folks to get it, but your render is correct and the time and frame count is correct.

If you are rendering to 29.97 fps then you have to display Drop Frame Timecode to get the correct time but there will be some frame numbers that are not displayed because the frame rate does not evenly divide into seconds. There are no missing frames, just missing frame numbers every few seconds.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

AFAICR this is a known issue prior to CC2018 and likely introduced in one of the renditions for CC2017. You should have no issues if there is no audio in your Timeline or if you render to a native QT CODEC and this means the Animation, JPEG and DNxH* variants.
Of course, you've already found out that rendering via AME does not result in this issue.

[Roland Kahlenberg · Accepted solution]

Here's the full write up from the AE Team.

If you render a QuickTime or AVI file through Render Queue to a non-native After Effects codec, the last frame of the output could be missing. The issue occurs if the project is set to Mercury GPU Acceleration.

Workaround: Use of the following options to workaround the issue:

• Choose a native codec such as Animation, DNxHR/DNxHD, GoPro CineForm, None, and ProRes (macOS only). Native codecs do not experience this issue unless the frame size is smaller than SD.
• Set the project to Mercury Software only. To set, select Project Settings > Video Rendering & Effects > Mercury Software only.
• Use Adobe Media Encoder to render the footage.

Known issues in After Effects CC 2018

[kirkeric]

Based on Dave's response, have you confirmed you are actually missing a frame?  The most logical, simple answer is that (0-749) which makes perfect sense.

Eric