Image Buffer issue - deadline please help

I know...I know... It's all over the forums. I'm doing earth zooms for a 10 part series and am halfway through, but these image buffer errors are killing me!

It happens regardless of the project. I'm using techniques that cut up the images to keep them small and parent them to a null. It's definitely an image buffer issue because it happens right when my large file size hits.

Here an example of the error I'm getting this evening:



I've read this http://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not... and tried some of the suggestions but I'm still having problems.

I'm on AE CS4.

Here are some settings:




I've toyed with this one with lots of combinations but still come up short: What's a good recipe for my situation?


My secret preference is purging every 10 frames now.

I have no footage in my comp. The comp is HDTV 1080 at 29.97 rendering to an animation codec QT all on local drives.

Any ideas at all would be most helpful. I've tried keeping my file sizes down, but feel there has got to be a way to push this to render at this size. I have months of rendering ahead of me and really want to kick this image buffer issue.

Thanks in advance,
Michael

Thanks for the quick reply. I should have mentioned that the exact error happens with multiprocessing turned off.

> ...which unfortunately I heard won't be happening for CS5. I hope I heard wrong.

Anyone who knows wouldn't be saying, so I can guarantee that anyone who told you this doesn't know.

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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share---or if there is something that you'd like to see added or improved---please leave a comment.

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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share---or if there is something that you'd like to see added or improved---please leave a comment.

I'm glad that you got it to work. If your problematic composition contains nested compositions, then you might want to look into pre-rendering. You mentioned that you're using a proxy; so this would be just another step in that direction.

> Should I leave multiprocessing off given my issue?

The general answer to that question is that there's no harm in trying to use this option, but don't hesitate to turn it off, especially for memory-intensive compositions. It helps in many but not all cases.

Here's a summary from After Effects Help:

"Using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature does not speed up the rendering of all compositions. The rendering of some compositions is memory-intensive, such as when you are working with very large background plates that are several thousands of pixels tall and wide. The rendering of some compositions is bandwidth-intensive (I/O-intensive), such as when you are working with many source files, especially if they are not served by a fast, local, dedicated disk drive. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature works best at improving performance when the resource that is most exercised by the composition is CPU processing power, such as when applying a processor-intensive effect like a glow or blur."

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the 'T' back in 'RTFM' : After Effects Help on the Web
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share---or if there is something that you'd like to see added or improved---please leave a comment.

Not really looking for compassion. Prerendering only helps if it's a comp that's causing the problem, the large images are just images so there's still a problem there.

Pre-rendering is basically the answer until Adobe releases 64-bit CS5. And even then I'm sure pre-rendering will be used in real production scenarios where time and resources are pushed to the brink. Even if the large image that is giving you problems is not inside a precomp, you can solo it (or a group of layers) and pre-render them by themselves. I use this technique in 1920x1080 productions all the time. Just as long as the layers you are pre-rendering aren't using any blending modes or effects that rely on an interaction with layers you are not pre-rendering. It's tough if the client requests changes, but a lot of time (and experience) has taught me which layers I can prerender in groups, anticipating which ones the client is most likely to "tweak". For pre-render settings, I use still frames (PSD files) rendered at full resolution, uncompressed. Personally, I'd almost rather render to PNG files, as they are smaller, but I've heard that they are a lossy compression. I don't think that's true, but for pre-renders you don't want to take a chance on anything getting compressed. Also, you may want to look into background rendering, as it uses less resources. AEScripts.com has a great script for making the whole background render process so completely simple, that you'll wonder how you did without it.


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