Character Animator Crashing on Export

[Birchmark]

Hi

I am having trouble with Character Animator.  It keeps crashing upon trying to export a png sequence and wav. 

I don't know what has triggered this but I can't seem to export as it just crashes each time I attempt to export.

Does anyone know why this could be happening and / or have any suggestions on what I can do? 

I would like to get this footage exported soon so that I can edit it alongside some video.

Thank you for your help

Regards
Danielle BIRCHMARK

[oksamurai]

When you're exporting do you have all other apps closed? Something might be fighting for resources. Even so, it shouldn't crash...hmmm. Does dynamic link into After Effects or Premiere Pro work instead?

[Birchmark]

Hi.  Sorry for the late response. Had some internet issues which didn't help and then stuff came up and I just had to put all this on hold for a moment. 

I have tried exporting both with and without other apps open and it didn't work without either. 

I just tried dynamic link through dragging the scene into premiere then.  Until you put your response there I didn't actually know CA could do dynamic link.  I knew you could with After effects and Premiere but I didn't know about that with CA.  It moved over to premiere but after it appeared to have finished conforming the project it had audio but instead of the picture it was showing the yellow media pending screen.  I tried to do it the other way by importing the character animator file into premiere rather than dragging but then found that for some reason that and a heap of other Adobe files were saved in My Documents (to the tune of around 60GB so that also explains where some of my C drive space went) for some reason so I am currently moving that folder from MyDocuments to the hard drive the rest of my work is saved on, and once that is done I will attempt to use dynamic link via importing the character animator file.  I will keep you posted about how this goes, thoguh I am glad it can do dynamic link as that also makes it easier to fix little errors I may have missed like if I accidentally coughed and it voice synced it etc as just muting it in premiere isn't as good if she still moves her mouth so this may be quite useful if it works properly. 

[Birchmark]

Hi

It is mostly working now (touch wood).  After moving those files, I tried to do dynamic link between CA and Premiere and characteranimator.exe just used up all of my physical memory on my computer meaning I ended up killing the process, so that didn't go too well.   However I opened the files in character animator, after moving the files from MyDocuments to a hard drive (not through recent project as that linked to the ones in my documents which werne't there anymore but through actually opening the project by locating it myself) and then exported as png sequence and wav and imported it into After Effects.  It worked.  I then had some issues with dynamic link between premiere and after effects but I then updated both of the programs and it worked fine.  I have not encountered any hiccups after doing this. 

[oksamurai]

Ok, glad to hear you found something that worked!

[Birchmark]

I just found AfterEffects.exe in the task manager using 17GB of memory, similar to what Character Animator was doing (but CA was using even more than that).  I had just exported something from Premiere Pro which included clips dynamically linked from After Effects but I did not have After Effects open itself.  Any reason it should be doing this and what should I do to prevent it doing that? 

[oksamurai]

Even if you don't have the app open, if you're referencing the files I believe it needs to run a process in the background to make the link work, which is probably why you're still seeing AE even if it's not technically open. Personally if I'm using AE with more complicated dynamic linking (like the time I did 27 puppets for the Tips & Tricks intro bumper), I'll bring the preview resolution down to help with performance.

[Birchmark]

Should it be doing it to the level of 17 GB and rising though?  It also wasn't doing it while I was actually editing as I could use Chrome etc while it was still open with no issues, but when exporting the video from Premiere it became slow and appeared to be chugging trying to do anything but exporting (but I have not had that issue any other time including when I had dynamically linked even more minutes of CA work that had been exported to AE and was an AE file (One time I had pretty much 3 hours of footage dynamically linked).  After it had finished exporting, Premiere was just sitting there open not being used which wouldn't normally be a problem but the computer was being slow and that is when I found Aftereffects.exe open and using 17GB of RAM and rising.  That didn't seem right given I can normally do things at the same time as having it open, even with more dynamically linked footage, and it was also just sitting there. 

[oksamurai]

Someone on the team suggested checking this out: Memory and storage in After Effects