After Effects renders black!
by David Franklin
on
Jun 24, 2009 at 2:50:15 pm
Hi All,
Seem to be getting an odd issue with AE CS4 when it comes to rendering. I've never experienced this before. It seems that if I have more than 7 compositions in a project, rendering out from any of them can produce a few little issues. This one I've come across twice now and I just don't get it...
Rendering out a composition can render some layers as black video, but some layers fine. I have a simple comp (that is going inside another comp) that is 6 layers of video, each fades in/out to the next. However only 1 layer will render out properly, the rest appear as black. It has happened before on another composition which rendered some background objects (seperate layers) as black video.
Again as I say, I never experienced this before, having ran AE 6-CS3 before. I even tried making the layers invisible and visible again just in case there was a crazy issue there... but no. I even tried rendering out as quicktime and AVI and BMP sequences with no luck, it's always the same.
Re: After Effects renders black! by Kevin Camp on Jun 24, 2009 at 4:29:06 pm
yep... if you are having screwy things happen in ae and all the screwy things are happening only to footage layers, then i'd look at what kind of codec was used for those footage layers... hdv, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 and h.264 are codecs that can give ae problems and should be converted to another codec like lossless animation, photo-jpeg, pro res 422, avid's dnxhd or dvcprohd (or sd varieties of dv).
if the footage is not the problem, try disabling multiprocessing in ae.
if that's not the problem, then let us know what effects are on the footage.
Re: After Effects renders black! by David Franklin on Jun 25, 2009 at 10:43:51 am
Thanks for the help guys. It DOES seem that it's a codec issue, though as I say I've not experienced it before. Odd that AE should display the footage but not render it out. I found that Premiere didn't even display the image, but Photoshop had no problem reading it and re-rendering out to an uncompressed quicktime file without issue. How is it one Adobe product can read a video file and others cannot..? AND that it was Photoshop that could figure it out and their video-based programs could not! Very odd, especially as the video was rendered out of premiere in the first palce as a simple DVPAL video.
Anyway, thanks for the tips... gonna keep my eye on this one!
Re: After Effects renders black! by Kevin Camp on Jun 25, 2009 at 2:36:15 pm
it is interesting that dv was giving you problems, it's not usually one of those codecs that gives ae trouble...
and i too have found that some adobe products will open a file, while another will not... however i haven't seen that with the more recent adobe products...
