Render error after completed - won't open mp4 file.

[menappi]

Ok guys so I'm having a problem rendering out a basic 30-minute clip (h264 mp4 file). After the 3 hour render the output MP4 file shows on my desktop and it says it's zero bytes and I get the following error in the log:

After Effects error: Rendering error while writing to file “/Users/username/Desktop/filename1.mp4”. You are running on a very low diskspace. Please free some disk space and try again. (-1610153453)

After Effects error: File “filename1.mp4” cannot be opened, it may be in an unsupported format. (86  ::  1)

I'm trying to render this out to my desktop and I have 50GB free on my local drive. I've successfully rendered out multiple other smaller clips (up to 30 seconds) just fine using the exact same output settings but this one has failed 3 times now...what gives?

[menappi]

Is it possible that 50GB free space isn't enough? I'm using a macbook pro and that's all I have available, seems like a lot to me considering my HDD is 256gb...and the file I'm rendering, although long (38 minutes) isn't very complicated, just an audio spectrum reacting to a mix I made on a black bg (render time of 2.5 hours total).

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

How are you rendering it? What version of AE do you have? Current versions of AE don't natively encode H.264 files. Well, you can kinda do it in a QuickTime container, but that is buggy and was never supported by Apple. The ideal way to do it is to send your AE composition to the Adobe Media Encoder to make your file. I'd suggest using the YouTube preset under the H.264 options in AME.

[menappi]

Thanks for the tips. I'm running an older 10.0 version and rendered a few smaller clips using h264 but the long one wouldn't work. I did what you said though and ran it through AME with the same setting sand it outputted just fine so I'll just use that solution going forward. Thanks!

[Szalam]

Hooray! I'm glad it worked.

Yeah, CS5 still had H.264 encoding in it. You've found one of the reasons it was removed in more recent versions! lol