Auto-trace freezes AE, but didnt use to.

[peteyface81]

Hey, friends.

This is driving me bananas. So, I found a cool way to key out my green screen by using keylight and then using the results from that to create a mask using auto-trace. I tried tested it out, it worked great. I felt happy. Now I've gone out and shot what I needed and have tried again and again, but now AE stops responding when I go to start the auto trace. I don't get how it worked the first time, but not anymore whwen I haven't made any changes.

I tried everything I could think or or read about:

restarting

deleting preferences

uninmstalling and reinstalling AE

Boostin the amount of RAM allocated for AE. I actually even noticed that not all my RAM was installed and went in and pushed in a couple sticks that wren't quite in all the way. So I'm in fact working with twice the RAM.

I tried testing out smaller chunks of my video, in case it just couldn't handle doing a longer one. I even went back to the same exact footage I used for my successful test. That crashed, too. I am having success if I trace just one frame. Just can't trace the whole work area.

If anyone has any ideas of what this could possibly be, that would be fabtastic. This is so damn frustrating!

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Auto trace acts differently depending on the complexity of the shot you are trying to work on. Once you have keyed footage, unless you specifically need a path to apply an effect to, there's no reason the add a mask. If your key is complex and there's a lot of movement and a lot of edges it's very easy for Auto Trace to quickly run out of resources and hang up or completely fail. That's probably what's happening but we can't know for sure without details, a screenshot of your entire project with the modified properties of the layers involved shown (press the u key twice), and some more information....

[Mylenium]

What Rick said - give us exact info and show us screenshots.

Mylenium