RAM usage limited in Preferences but After Effects still consumes all of it

[Tiscar]

Hi, I'm using the rotobrush tool and when I freeze or when I roto very large footage After Effects consumes all my RAM and close. I have the RAM amount limited in the preferences, but it seems the tool don't respect this limit. I'm using After Effects 2019 and 2018, with the same error, and I can't see any solution...

Is this a bug of the rotobrush?

[Martin_Ritter]

How much RAM is installed, how much is assigned to AE?

*Martin

[Tiscar]

I have 64 GB and I assigned to After 40-50 GB. I know I will need to optimize my workflow with proxies etc but I don't understand why After Effects is not respecting my memory settings. 

[Martin_Ritter]

RAM installed and assigned looks good.

How do you check how much RAM AE consums?

*Martin

[Tiscar]

I check it in the Task Manager, and the memory consumed always continue to grow when freezing the rotobrush

[Dave_LaRonde]

You'll want to have at least 16 GB RAM to run AE smoothly.  32 GB is better.  How much do YOU have?

[Tiscar]

I have 64 GB. I'm working on large 4K footage so I guess I would have to cut it in a few parts... However I don't understand why After Effects is not limiting the RAM, it's like it ignore my preference settings.

[Dave Merchant · Accepted solution]

Yes it sounds like a bug. After Effects is addicted to RAM but it should certainly respect the limit set in Preferences.

What's your operating system, and can you work out if it's specifically a RB issue, of whether it bursts through the limit when other things are happening too? Are there any third-party plugins used? In theory we should be able to reproduce it if we know exactly what your setup is, but the fact you're seeing it on two old versions is concerning as if it was a long-standing bug in the AE codebase then folks would have reported it to heck and back by now.

[Tiscar]

Hi Dave, I'm on Windows 10 Home and I have recently installed Neat Video plugin for removing noise. In this project I'm using too Mocha Pro for importing tracked masks although I'm using it for a few years ago and it hasn't given me any problems before.

For now, I'm being able to do the shots dividing the comp in other smaller in size comps (cropping them and reimport them) and this has highly optimized my workflow.

Tonight I will run some test to see if this bug occurs with other effects as well. But yeah if this is a bug it would be strange that anybody hadn't reported it before.

Thanks guys for your help!

[Tiscar]

I did a test with other effects and After Effects respects the limit of the RAM assigned: when I play the video (RAM preview) and reaches this limit,  it stops caching and goes into a loop playback mode. But when I apply the rotobrush and freeze, if it reaches the limit it ignore it and continue consuming RAM. 

[Dave Merchant]

OK, so it's reproducible at least on your setup. Please file a bug report at https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects - if possible including a bare-bones example.

[Dave Merchant]

>>This is not a solution<<

Since it appears AE is ignoring its own RAM limit for this particular combination of effects, one option to try and stop the entire OS crashing is to use an external program to force a RAM cap in the Windows tasker. It might have unintended consequences because if AE still tries to malloc() itself into oblivion Winodws will start giving it pagefile storage, and that's very very slow - but hopefully it'll prevent blue screens so you can cancel AE in time to save the work.

There's an open-source process memory limiter at https://github.com/lowleveldesign/process-governor

[Tiscar]

Thanks Dave, I will fill the bug report and I will take a look at that memory limiter, great idea.