MASSIVE Errors when exporting in AE 2023

[Florian5ED6]

Hello,

I have used After Effects a lot over the past years but Version 2023 has to be the most broken piece of software that I have ever experienced.

When I work in AE and playback my Animation, everything works fine but when I export it to .mov or .mp4 my render is full of flickering, footage just randomly switches on and off. It's not even the same errors every time I hit render. It is random. What the hell is happening here?

I use AE 2023 on Windows 10 and 11.

Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU with latest NVidia Studio drivers.

64 gigs of Ram

i9 9900K

[Florian5ED6]

Edit: It is not random. The flicker occurs in the same manner.

[Florian5ED6]

And I also found out that on my Laptop with Windows 10 and RTX 3060 it renders finde.

On my collegues Macbook Pro there are also massive problems.

[Mylenium]

Turn off hardware accelerated in the Preferences under the Import section, check the hardware acceleration options in general, update your graphics driver, clean out the caches.

Mylenium

[Florian5ED6]

did all of that, still corrupted outputs. thanks anyway

[Kyle Hamrick]

Sorry you're running into this issue. The fact that your laptop rendered correctly means that something in your specific system configuration probably has something to do with it. Mylenium's suggestions are a good place to start troubleshooting.

Some questions to help narrow things down:

Is this project using any third-party tools?

Are you running into this issue on all projects, or just this specific one? 

Are you seeing this issue on projects without footage?
Have you tried encoding your footage in another format?

It does sound like video driver might be at play here. Does your laptop have the same video driver as this machine? It might be worth trying to update, downgrade, or swap to the game driver to see if any of those have an effect. 

[Florian5ED6]

I tried the exact same driver version on my workstation and it didnt help.

There is only Video Copilot Optical Flares in the mix, everything else is AE default plugins.

[Rameez_Khan]

Hi @Florian5ED6,

Sorry to hear about this!

Is your render full of flickering green frames? If yes, then it's a known issue with Nvidia drivers. See this thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/after-effects-2023-green-preview-with-h-264...

You need to revert to driver version 517.40 to get rid of the issue. We're working with Nvidia on a fix.

Thanks,

Rameez

[Florian5ED6]

No, no green, just .mp4 footage turning off and on randomly while exporting. I have now converted all .mp4s to .mov proxies and now it works again, regardless of the driver version. There is something very very wrong I have the feeling. And it's not just me, it's alle the Windows machines of my collegues as well. My windows 10 laptop does export just fine for whatever reason, regardless if it's .mov or .mp4 source footage

[Florian5ED6]

I also tried the suggested driver, which did not have any impact on the export. Still faulty when using .mp4 sources

[Kyle Hamrick]

While I'd agree you shouldn't be seeing problems this severe, and there does appear to be something amiss in this current version for users with certain configurations, .mp4 is not and has never been a good working format. It's intended to be a delivery format (though I know some camera manufacturers have added confusion here).
If converting your files to .mov (ProRes is the obvious answer these days) is a solution, good, because that's something most folks would advise you to be doing anyway. 
Using a compressed format like .mp4 means your machine is actually having to uncompress/decode each frame as it's working, which will always be slower than working with a format intended to actually be used in production. 

[Florian5ED6]

yes, but it always worked flawlessly and as u might know, almost anything you get from stock websites and very very much other sources is .mp4. It would be a tremendous effort to always convert any file. So your speed argument will not count for fast one time productions.

I am aware of the technological superiority of ProRes and like to use it as often as possible but this has to be solved.

[Kyle Hamrick]

I agree with many of your points, although it has not "always worked flawlessly." On the contrary, compressed formats have always been potentially troublesome; mp3s were the cause of audio woes for many years. If they never caused you issues in the past, count yourself lucky! 😉

[Florian5ED6]

I have been working with thousands of .mp4 for many years now and there never was a single problem like this