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DannyAskew
Participant
May 23, 2012
Question

Unable to create image buffer after RAM preview

  • May 23, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 19022 views

Running into an odd and frustrating error. Built a comp using the new Ray-traced 3D renderer and now I'm regretting being an early adopter big time with all the problems I've been encountering with it. The latest comes whenever I do a longer RAM preview in an attempt to watch the whole duration of my comp. It will get to about 170 frames or so, at which point I've interrupted by pressing spacebar because I don't need to see all the way to the end of my work area (around 220 frames). It'll play the RAM preview back fine, and even loop it, but as soon as I stop playback, I get this error message: "After Effects warning: Unable to create image buffer." There's only one button: "okay" and as soon as I click it the same error pops up again and it will never go away, forcing me to close AE from the task manager. I've taken to saving before every RAM preview like I used to do with Flash before previewing my buggy swfs for fear I'll lose all my work after previewing. Any ideas about what might be causing this?

Some more details about my comp:

1920x1080 @ 29.97

Ray-traced 3D

About 70 3D layers (I'm guessing this is my downfall - new renderer not designed for this many layers?)

Running Windows 7 Professional

i7 2600K

32GB RAM

2x GTX 570 video cards running latest driver (301.42, CUDA 4.2.1)

508GB free on my 2TB internal drive where the project and cache lives

From my GPU info window in case it's useful:

Fast Draft:Available
Texture Memory:600.00 MB
Ray-tracing:GPU

OpenGL

Vendor:NVIDIA Corporation
Device:GeForce GTX 570/PCIe/SSE2
Version:3.0.0
Total Memory:1.20 GB
Shader Model:4.0 or later

CUDA

Driver Version:4.2
Devices:2 (GeForce GTX 570, GeForce GTX 570)
Current Usable Memory:1.04 GB (at application launch)
Maximum Usable Memory:1.25 GB
    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    May 23, 2012

    Yeah, some buffer is very likely not flushing when you interrupt the preview and then there is no more memory on the graphics hardware. Consider setting the work area and your preview options to use only the work area. if it finishes the preview "correctly", it may not suffer the issue. Beyond that - raytracing doesn't/ shouldn't care about the number of items. The math is such, that it makes no difference whether you render a million polygons or just one. Of course there are still limitations due to the GPU dependency, but I doubt you ever truly exhaust the cards' geometry buffers. Compared to pixel data that is a small amount...

    Mylenium

    D
    DannyAskewAuthor
    Participant
    May 25, 2012

    Unfortunately, it does the same thing if I let the RAM preview finish the whole requested portion as well. And sometimes it won't even finish, AE will just hang and Windows pops up it's default "This program is not responding" message before it even finishes the RAM preview. Interesting what you say about the raytracing, that's good to know. It must be some issue with the graphics memory or swapping memory or something. Very frustrating as it seems like 32gb of RAM and 2 officially supported video cards working in tandem should be enough to do what it says on the box...

    D
    DannyAskewAuthor
    Participant
    May 25, 2012

    Great news! The new update (http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2012/05/after-effects-cs6-11-0-1-update-bug-fixes-and-added-gpu-and-3d-renderer-support.html) seems to have fixed the problem! My RAM previews render faster and I'm no longer getting errors or crashes. I expected a fix, but not so soon. Glad to see the update got rolled out just when I needed it!

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