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Ae Render "Failures" - Ae not releasing RAM

Community Beginner ,
Mar 14, 2017 Mar 14, 2017

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Hello Everyone.

I apologize for the length of this message. I have posted this message on Creative Cow and the Video CoPilot Forums.

I am working on a motion graphics animation tutorial for a board game company. For some reason my machine is not releasing RAM between shots in my Render Queue which causes my shots to "fail" (message Ae gives me) during the night when moving from one shot in the queue to the next. It seems that Ae uses up all of my RAM (64 gb) and does not release it even when a render is completed.

When I just render one shot at a time, a shot that at first give me an estimated time to complete of 2-hours, will just keep getting larger and larger. Sometimes estimating over 6-hours. When one of those shots does complete my RAM is not released by Ae. I am using the SystemPal app to monitor my system and the RAM that is being used. The only way to get the RAM back (purge does not work) is to restart Ae.

I have included a screen shot of one of my comps so you all can see the layers. The "Decks" are pre-comps with 25 layers in each (each card is 1200px tall at 72dpi). The three pre-comps near the top are overlay layers (animated drop-downs that explain rules when the VO talks about stuff) that are not 3D. I have 6 Element 3D layers; bottom is a table and chairs in the shot, the other 5 are token pools (3 of which are animated tokens moving from one area to another). For the most part, in E3D, I am leaving the particle size at the default 10 and upscaling my 3D objects in the E3D panel. The bottom pre-comp is a room (floor, walls, windows and a door. All 2D layers).

I thought there might be a bug with E3D in CC 2017, but I opened the project in CC 2015 and I run into the same issue. I have double checked and run a RAM test ("option D" on start up) on my machine and it came back clean. I am giving Ae 48 GB of my 64 GB of RAM. I tried using the "secret" menu to force Ae to dump the RAM after 25, 10, and 5 frames, but it does not seem to do anything; no change in render "failures" and it does not seem to dump the memory. I am monitoring my RAM using the SystemPal App that runs in the menu bar.

I went back to all of my E3D models and made sure they are not huge for vertices and faces. Right now my largest model (some curtains in the background) have 10,000 vertices and 4,000 faces. All of my tokens that are on the table are in the hundreds so I know they are small enough.

I double checked my textures for size. Nothing is over 2k and all of them are 72 dpi and in RGB color space. I have made almost a dozen videos using the same kinds of settings which is why I am so confused. I have not had this issue with my past issues.

I have trouble shot this thing all to hell and I cannot seem to find the issue. So now, here I am, asking you all. I think you in advance for your time. And, just to answer this before someone asks, I am doing all of this in Ae because that is what my company has given me. I don't have access to a dedicated 3D program.

System:

Late 2013 MacPro running 10.11.6

3.5 GHz 6-core Xeon E5

64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC

AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB

After Effects CC 2017 14.1.0.57

Ae is utilizing 48 GB leaving 16 GB (memory preference)

Monitoring system RAM using SystemPal App (runs in menu bar)

Thank you again everyone. I look forward to hearing your thoughts

screen20shot202017-02-2420at201.52.0320pm.png

screen20shot202017-02-2420at202.04.1720pm.png

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Community Beginner , Mar 20, 2017 Mar 20, 2017

Hurray! I found the answer. Bear with me while I attempt to explain what is going on. It ended up being a scaling issue with the 3D models inside of E3D. I am including an image so it will be easier to understand. The smaller token (the one on the right) is a new model.

Top Panel: In this image there are two tokens. The token with the arrow pointing to it is the original model as created by the 3D modeler in my department. When importing and leaving the scale at 100%and turning on "normalize size

...

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Adobe Employee ,
Mar 14, 2017 Mar 14, 2017

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Moving to After Effects​

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LEGEND ,
Mar 15, 2017 Mar 15, 2017

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When I first started reading your post, I was sure the secret menu purge option was going to be your answer. WHAT A TWIST to find out you've already tried it!

You've done videos using very similar setups and assets before which makes me think you may just have a corrupted project file of some kind. Try importing that project into a brand new project and see if it behaves better.

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 16, 2017 Mar 16, 2017

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Hello Szalam. Thanks for the reply. I have gone back into my project and made most of the textures only 1000px on the largest direction. I have one instance of Motion Tile going 800h x 800w but I don't think that is the issue. Not that you needed to know that info. lol

When you mention "importing into a brand new project" do you mean, open a new project and import my older project into it, then save as a new project name? Wouldn't any corrupted aspects just come into the new project once I import it in?

Thanks again for your thoughts.

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LEGEND ,
Mar 16, 2017 Mar 16, 2017

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ryant7897800  wrote

do you mean, open a new project and import my older project into it, then save as a new project name?

Yes. Create a brand new project, import the other one, save it with a new name.

ryant7897800  wrote

Wouldn't any corrupted aspects just come into the new project once I import it in?

No.

I know. I don't understand it either. I have seen the weirdest issues solved by doing this.

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 16, 2017 Mar 16, 2017

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Thanks again for the quick reply, Szalam. I will attempt to do that, set some renders, and report back tomorrow. I would do it now but my bosses have me editing some video footage; lol.

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 17, 2017 Mar 17, 2017

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Hey Szalam.

Well... no such luck. Importing into a new Ae project just replicated the error. I have resigned myself to rendering out a background pass (my room, table, et al), a mid frame pass (cards, tokens, et al) and an overlays pass (my vignettes and drop in graphics). I will just combine them in Pr when doing my editing. Annoying, but it is seeming to work.

I have figured out that the issue is indeed with Element 3D. I am going back into my models and checking things. I notice that my token models, while small with faces and vertices, are massive models that I am shrinking to 10% of their normalized size. I am having my modeler go back into those and make them more normalized in scale.

I am going too keep updating posts here in case someone else stumbles into this issue. I will have more notes come next week.

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 20, 2017 Mar 20, 2017

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Hurray! I found the answer. Bear with me while I attempt to explain what is going on. It ended up being a scaling issue with the 3D models inside of E3D. I am including an image so it will be easier to understand. The smaller token (the one on the right) is a new model.

Top Panel: In this image there are two tokens. The token with the arrow pointing to it is the original model as created by the 3D modeler in my department. When importing and leaving the scale at 100%and turning on "normalize size" it is massive.

Bottom Panel: When you turn off "normalize size" (for the original token model), you can see that the scale becomes tiny.

The issue was the scale of the original model. I did not think anything of this when originally creating my scene since 3D models are vector based objects. I just shrunk the "normalized size" down to 4%. Conversely, the "non-normalized size" would have to be scaled up past 250% to be in scale with everything else (not shown) in my scene.

And this was the problem. Ae was using all of my vRAM attempting to deal with the scale of the tokens for some reason. I went back to my modeler and had him export the tokens again. First he upscaled the object 261%, which put it at 100% (non-normalized size) in my E3D scene. He then used a self-made script to reset all aspects of the object to zero, and exported a new .obj for me. This reset the token to a perfect 100% for me.

I ran a series of renders over the weekend and none of them "failed". My RAM sat at around 50% usage (where it should be) and the RAM cleared after each shot rendered (like it should). So there you go. When working with E3D, keep an eye on the model sizes in your shots, they can kill your vRAM and cause you to have "failed" renders.

TokenAeE3D.jpg

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LEGEND ,
Mar 20, 2017 Mar 20, 2017

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I'm so glad you got it working! Thank you for letting us know how you solved it.

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