I am rendering quite a few music videos that are composited from start to finish with Keylight in AE CC 2017. This issue has been happening in CC 2015.2 and 2015.3 and I can't seem to find a fix for it. Every time I open a project that uses Keylight, the first time I open it, it crashes. Sometimes while scrubbing through with the playhead, it crashes. Every time I try to render within After Effects to a full bitrate H264, it crashes. Even sending it to Media Encoder is a crap shoot as to whether or not it fails or completes (much less that it doesn't use all my RAM or CPU). It will render to different points in the video each time before crashing, so it's not a specific piece of media that is causing the issue. It is crashing using source files of various mediums and codecs and formats (which I will list below). I've updated graphics drivers, rolled back graphics drivers, nothing seems to work. After crashes, After Effects and AME sometimes don't open, freeze when you try to do anything in them, requiring a system reboot.
Rendering other projects that do not contain keylight effects appears to be working flawlessly. It does look like it is a problem with the keylight plugin, however I do not have another option for compositing as the built in, default, keying effects in After Effects are terrible and do not have the amount of control needed for these applications. I have tried 2 methods with keylight. Using keylight as a track matte and then using an advanced spill suppressor to remove the green and levels to adjust color, and then using keylight on it's on with final result as the render option. Both ways causes crashing.
System build
Intel i7-6700k @4.00 GHz
Motherboard - Gigabyte Z170X-UD3
RAM - 32GB (6GB reserved for other applications)
GPU - GTX 960 4GB (though AE doesn't really use the GPU)
Windows 10 (OS and Adobe software on an SSD)
Source media is on a network drive (also tested with a local drive)
Rendering directly to a local HDD
Codec/frame sources
4k/30 MP4 (MXF container) from a Canon C300
^ footage converted to ProRes
4k/30 MP4 from a GH4
1080p/30 mp4 from an AC-160
720p/60 MP4 from an AC-160
I have tried rendering to Quicktime using an H264 codec, MPEG-4 Video codec and more recently (through AME) AVI using an 8-bit uncompressed 4:2:2 codec. Encoding to uncompressed managed to work once but I can't keep rendering out 30 GB files when I have so many to make.
Solutions I've tried:
Emptying disk cache
Emptying AE temp files
Rebooting PC
Converting media to another format
Rendering to another format
Re-creating the project
Using the media on a local drive
Attempt to render on another machine
Update to newer versions of After Effects
If there is something set up incorrectly with my workflow or some setting in some menu that needs to be changed then someone please let me know. I've been going through the forums and trying to find answers but everything I've seen has either said "it's The Foundries plugin, take it up with them" or the default list of try these if you are getting errors and crashes. I've tried them and I'm getting really tired of keylight causing so many problems through so many different builds of Creative Cloud. I know Keylight is made by The Foundry but Adobe has seen fit to integrate it into it's baseline plugin/effect set so please either offer a fix or make The Foundry fix their plugin if you wish to continue including it in After Effects.
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