After Effects "Output Module" render error & rendering advice

[Mortisfilm]

Hi all,

I've been working on an AfterEffects project for a few weeks and never had a problem with rendering it before, but in the past few days it has started giving me error messages every time I start a render.

After rendering about 48 - 60 frames of a 2 minute long composition (it doesn't seem to hang in the same place every time), the render freezes and I get this error message:

After Effects error: An output module stopped responding. The file may be damaged or corrupted. You may need to restart After Effects.

The project is really huge -- about 1022 3D layers, mostly all created in Photoshop, as well as some Quicktime movies. Motion blur is turned on for everything. Although the project is big, I have a 3D camera that animates through the scene, so not all the layers are onscreen at all times.

I haven't added anything significant to the composition lately, I've just been adjusting keyframes, so that would lead me to believe the render isn't failing because of a corrupted element.

I'm using Adobe After Effects CS5, Version 10.0.2.4. I have some 3rd party plug-ins installed (Trapcode, Magic Bullet Looks, Optical Flares), but I'm not using any 3rd party effects on this project, though I plan to in the future.

I'm running the project on a 2 x 2.66 Ghz 6-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro with 14 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, using OS X version 10.6.8.

Here is some information about my project:

1280 X 720, Square Pixels, 23.976 Frame Rate, Rendering Plug-in: Advanced 3D. For my preferences, I don't have "render multiple frames simultaneously" checked, and I keep 4 GBs of RAM reserved for other applications. I also have OpenGL disabled.

And finally, here are some screenshots of my Render Settings and Output Module for this project:

 

I'd really appreciate any feedback or advice on how to troubleshoot this error. And I'd also love to hear if the experts on this board have render settings tips or advice on how to set up my render preferences for my particular machine.

Thanks and hope all is well,

Dan

[TimeRemapper]

Hey Dan,

Really nice post in regards to info provided initially. It's rare to see that these days.

The weird thing in your screen shots that I see, is that in your Output Module Settings, the audio bit-depth settings seem to be grayed out for some reason. Are you using some sort of audio hardware that is customized, or perhaps some compressed audio in your project? Here's what I mean:

Thoughts? Aside from that, your project does sound as if it is pretty intensive, so I'm sure the problem could be occuring elsewhere...

[Mortisfilm]

Thanks for the fast reply!

Not sure why the audio bit-depth settings are grayed out -- perhaps it's because my render is set to output using the AAC Audio Codec -- when I have that selected, I notice that the audio bit-depth settings are grayed out, so perhaps that's why nothing shows up there.

The audio that's currently in my project are AIFF files, encoded at 44.100 kHz/32 bit U/Stereo. They've been in the project for a long time, and I was using them back before my renders started to hang, so I'm not sure it's an audio issue.

But I'll try rendering overnight with the audio output deselected, to see if that helps at all.

Would it help if I purchased more RAM and installed it in my machine? Or set the preferences up to render multiple frames simultaneously?

Dan

[isoscelesnyc]

I think I solved my problem with this, not sure if it will also solve yours - even though this post is about a year out of date.

In system preferences on my Mac - I had put hard disks to sleep whenever possible. Since my OS is running on hard-drive 1 ( after effects, cashes, etc ) and my files are being written to hard-drive 2, I believe this iw where my problem lied.

I hope this helps at all.

[Matt Dubuque]

Hi Mortisfilm, over the longer term, you might want to consider adding more RAM.

I would start with a clean slate here.

I would go to Preferences/Media & Disk Cache and then click on the "Empty Disk Cache" button in the top portion of the resulting screen.

Matt

[SaberGaming]

I have been having the same error it doen't seem to happen with small projects tho..

[tristansummers]

If you reselect the output drive and folder it can fix this. It may be that the drive was parked/busy/sleeping/trimming at the exact time you hit render and it lost the path. It will not find it again until you reselect it from the Drive letter down (I found on: Z820, 2xSamsung 840 Pro in RAID 0, W7Pro, CC,).

Perhaps the likelihood of the drive being busy/fragmented is higher with bigger projects?

I think this may also happen with preference files sometimes.