AE rendering error (memory leak?)
bsnyder175 Jun 16, 2009 11:54 AMI bought a new computer about a year ago, which I believed to be more than enough to power AE and the other apps I use with it. It's an 8-core 3.2 GHz Mac with 4 gigs of ram. However, AE is constantly erroring out during a render test of mine. Nothing more than basic screen screen (subjects are blacked out) with a jpg background. It's about 35 minutes long. It error'd probably 3 or 4 times before I lowered the composition size from 640x480 to 320x240. One render made it through successfully in this size. I made an extremely slight change (just moving one of the subjects) and did another test render of 2 minutes. It was flyin right through and again, the render stopped saying it "Failed." It never produces error log files, so I have no idea what's going on.
After a failed attempt, I'll try it again and the program stops responding when I hit Render. From there, I have to force-quit and try again.
I've turned on my Activity Monitor to see how much memory it's soaking up, and it's never anymore than ~2 gigs. Is this a memory issue? I find it completely hard to believe with this system.
I would REALLY appreciate any knowledge that anyone can give me regarding the situation.
Edit: the last render I did was again a 2 minute-length video. 2 minutes, 18 seconds into the render process, it failed. Activity Monitor showed it stopped at 2.84 gigs of memory (a constant climbing number until it failed there). It also displays "AE (null)" as the title of the process. And, after a failed render, AE sits at 2.84 gigs of memory. That memory never gets freed back up, which I'm guessing is why the application becomes non-responsive.
Edit 2: After looking at how much Free memory I have, it shows around ~2.5 gigs (that's with only AE and firefox open). If this is a memory problem, how much do I need to execute simple renders like this in AE? All it is, is a 320x240 key'd-out, silhouette subject with a different background (ideally an hour long - but even 2 minute-length fails). Should AE really need to use ~3 gigs of memory for this task? I am more than willing to put a few more gigs of ram into this computer if necessary, but I don't want to add more if AE will use all of that ram up also, to the point of crashing. I'm wondering if it's a problem beyond system requirements (which this computer should meet 3 times over). It's really frustrating.





