Simple renders fail/out of memory

[crankin07]

Hello AE community,

I've been having this problem with memory that I have never had before in AE. I made a project that's about 2 minutes long, and all it contains is audio and icons moving across the screen. Probably the most intense thing I have going on in this project is motion blur. I keep getting a number of errors such as the "unspecified drawing error", "After Effects out of memory", and my renders consistently fail. I've tried rendering in Media Encoder and my renders still fail. Sometimes AE will crash when doing previews even when I delete memory and disk cache frequently. My RAM will spike to 100% usage (what seems like) randomly. I'm running 16 gigs of RAM and my disk drives have plenty of space on them, so I don't see how AE is running out of memory on such a simple project. This issue happens across the board on several of my projects that are similar in structure and concept.

Is it a graphics card issue? Because after doing some research trying to figure this problem out I found that my graphics card isn't compatible with AE CC. Any guidance in this subject would be greatly appreciated.

(And yes, I have updated all of my drives)

[ToolfarmJP]

Hello,

Does it work well if you change the setting of Video Rendering and Effects on Project Settings (File > Project Settings) from your current choice to something else?

[crankin07]

Yeah, I've tried switching between the mercury software and mercury GPU settings, but that doesn't seem to change anything.

[Dave Merchant]

If you have 16GB of RAM in total, then After Effects is probably only seeing 10/12 for the cache once your operating system has taken a chunk. 12Gb is a lot for any sensible application, but unfortunately After Effects is insanely memory-hungry during renders, and will easily hoover up over 50GB per minute if it's available.

When it runs out of RAM then it will start on virtual memory, but that is also limited by the OS swapfile size. Eventually it falls over. Assuming the composition is not over-spec (e.g. using 16 or 32bpc when 8 will do, or loading vast bitmaps then scaling them down to fit) then there's nothing much you can do other than buy more memory. Adobe shows no signs that they can make After Effects keep to sensible cache limits.

[crankin07]

I know that AE uses a ton of RAM when rendering. I had to get these videos out and I ended up taking the files to a friend's laptop and rendered them from there. It was a basic laptop with only 8 gigs and it rendered them just fine. So why can't my desktop with double the RAM handle renders and previews?

[OussK]

you don't give us any information about disk cash so did you give AE enough space on disk cash also can you share some screenshoot about you project including timeline and the effects you used.

[crankin07]

Here are some of the project details: I allocated 13 out of my 16 gigs of RAM to AE. I created a folder on another hard drive with over 130 gigs available for the disk cache to dump into. I made the maximum disk cache size 20 gigs. The only effect I have on the individual layers/png images is motion blur. I included one of the error windows that pops up as well. I apologize if its a lot of information to sort through.

[crankin07]

Oh, I also have 1 mask in the project

[Dave Merchant]

OK, so the error is a GPU memory failure (which wasn't mentioned in the question). As you guessed it's because you don't have a compatible card.

[Mo Moolla]

What GPU are u currently running?

[Dave Merchant]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Mo+Moolla  wrote

What GPU are u currently running?

Read his post.

[danyg83]

(Read all to understand the causes and troubleshooting steps)

I had After Effects CC 2019 throw all popular errors on me:

- out of memory

- display acceleration disabled

- unspecified drawing error

- keylight out of memory

After trying all solution proposals I could find, like...

- reinstalling the software

- changing and clearing the cache

- changing settings (mercury transmit, skipping frames, hardware acceleration, cpu/gpu rendering etc.)

- resetting settings (ctrl+alt+shift while launching the app)

...the errors were still there.

The last thing I didn't try was to disable all startup/tray-running apps. And guess what? AE started to work stable again!Then I wanted to pin-point which of the startup apps was responsible for the "damage", so I disabled them one by one and checked how AE behaved. And guess what? Errors came back! So none of the startup apps was to blame.

This time I've decided to check systems Event Viewer for more clues...

Every time AE crashed, the event viewer issued a warning "Resource-Exhaustion-Detector" with details like "Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: ..."
This kind of error usually reflects a paging file problem. This moment I also realized I've turned off my paging files completely once I bought 32GB of RAM assuming it wont be needed anymore with this amount of memory on board.

Re-enabling "automatic managing of paging file for all drives" in system settings brought stability and performance back to AE and it didn't throw me any of above mentioned errors again.