The size of your layer all by itself is not too great; it's big, but it's well within the limits of what can fit into the RAM that After Effects has available. Here's a partial list of factors that cause the image buffer to be greater for an image of a given size:
- higher color depth (16 bpc or 32 bpc)
- glow and blur effects
- 3D shadows
- color management
- blending modes and layer styles
- applying pulldown
- depth-of-field effects
- temporal effects
you can selectively tweak these factors and see if that allows the troublesome frame(s) to render.
Basically, the issue comes down to how much After Effects has to hold in memory to render a single frame. If it has to hold multiple frames in memory at once (as can happen for blending modes and temporal effects), or if the rendering has to consider pixels outside of the edge of the layer (as with glow effects, etc.), then the amount of memory required is greater. (more
here)
The limit is a few GB, which is why a 30,000x30,000 32-bpc image with nothing added still bumps against the limit. John is right that this limit is imposed by the 32-bitness of the After Effects CS4 application.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the 'T' back in 'RTFM' :
After Effects Help on the Web
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