From: "Michael Oliver" <temp@(email surpressed)>
Subject: After Effects 7 Rendering
   Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:10:46 -0500

We keep running into the following error while rendering After Effects 7 
projects.  The error seems to occur randomly and all frames eventually 
complete after being re-qued multiple times. (The image buffer differs 
depending on the project)



aerender Error: After Effects error: could not create 6046 x 4009 image 
buffer.



I tried changing memory and purge settings within after effects on the local 
machines but that hasn't worked.  Can you script these into the command 
line?



I tried telling rush to re-que the frames automatically if they fail but 
that's not working either forcing artists to baby-sit their renders so they 
can manually re-que failed frames.  Anyone noticed this before?



I'm using 102.42a8 and AE7 with the 7.0.1 update installed.

Michael Oliver wrote:

We keep running into the following error while rendering After Effects 7 projects. The error seems to occur randomly and all frames eventually complete after being re-qued multiple times. (The image buffer differs depending on the project)

aerender Error: After Effects error: could not create 6046 x 4009 image buffer.

	Just curious; is there a pattern for these errors that follows
	particular machines and/or the amount of free disk space or ram
	on the machines that fail (ie. the /var/tmp or user's home directory?)

	You might do a quick check of available disk space/ram on the
	machines, just in case there's a shortage. Also, you might check
	the /var/log/system.log (MAC) and/or the event manager (windows)
	to see if there were any 'out of memory/disk space' events at the
	time the render failed.

	I'm just guessing based on the error its out of disk or ram resources.

	Or maybe it's having trouble rendering two instances of AE on each
	machine instead of just one?

I tried changing memory and purge settings within after effects on the local machines but that hasn't worked. Can you script these into the command line?

	If re-queuing the frame helps the problem eventually, then what
	you could do is add a small bit of code into the submit-afterfx.pl
	(right after the run of aerender) that checks for that error,
	and requeues the frame via 'exit(2);' if found, eg:

[..]
	# INVOKE AERENDER, CHECK FOR ERRORS
	print "\nExecuting: $command\n";
	$exitcode = RunCommand($command, \$errmsg);

	### ADD THESE LINES: START
	if ( LogCheck("^Executing:",
                      "After Effects error: could not create.*image buffer") ne "" )
	{
	    print "--- ERROR: AERENDER FAILED WITH 'image buffer' ERROR (REQUEING)\n";
	    exit(2);
	}
	### ADD THESE LINES: END

	# HANDLE EXIT CODES
[..]

Anyone noticed this before?

	If anyone is familiar with this error, do follow up here.

	BTW, I just did a google search for:

After Effects error: could not create image buffer

	and there were a lot of hits, eg:

http://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not.asp
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/216/171
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=87457

	AfterFX's "aerender" command does not have a lot of command line
	argument flags, so I think it's something they have to set in
	their scene file.

	Feel free to ask Adobe support about this one, as apparently
	its a very common error.

--
Greg Ercolano, erco@(email surpressed)
Rush Render Queue, http://seriss.com/rush/
Tel: (Tel# suppressed)
Fax: (Tel# suppressed)
Cel: (Tel# suppressed)

Try lowing the Max RAM cache. I don't know of anyway to do this with  
an aerender flag, unfortunately. aerender uses the same settings as  
the GUI.

On Feb 28, 2007, at 5:10 PM, Michael Oliver wrote:

> We keep running into the following error while rendering After  
> Effects 7
> projects.  The error seems to occur randomly and all frames eventually
> complete after being re-qued multiple times. (The image buffer differs
> depending on the project)



. . . . . . . . . . . .
Gary Jaeger // Core Studio
86 Graham Street, Suite 120
San Francisco, CA 94129
(Tel# suppressed)
http://corestudio.com	

Gary Jaeger wrote:

Try lowing the Max RAM cache. I don't know of anyway to do this with an aerender flag, unfortunately. aerender uses the same settings as the GUI.

	Yes.. this page talks about running AE (on intel macs specifically)
	with the Max Ram Cache cranked way down to 15%:
	http://www.creativecow.net/articles/jones_graham/AE7_on_Intel_MacPro/index.html

	Also, some really good info on this subject here:
	http://generalspecialist.com/archive/2006_11_01_archive.asp


--
Greg Ercolano, erco@(email surpressed)
Rush Render Queue, http://seriss.com/rush/
Tel: (Tel# suppressed)
Fax: (Tel# suppressed)
Cel: (Tel# suppressed)

Thanks for the tips.  I had also read all of those pages dedicated to this 
particular error.  It is apparently extremely common.  Unfortunately I had 
made all of those settings changes on each computer and am still getting the 
error.



Thanks a million Greg for that little code snippet.  I put it into our after 
effects general submit and all of our renders are eventually completing 
(despite retries of 20 or more sometimes!).



Hopefully Adobe will address this issue as well as compatibility with Intel 
Macs in the next release.  Until then....



***************************************



"Michael Oliver" <temp@(email surpressed)> wrote in message 
news:1491-rush decimal general at seriss decimal com...
> We keep running into the following error while rendering After Effects 7 
> projects.  The error seems to occur randomly and all frames eventually 
> complete after being re-qued multiple times. (The image buffer differs 
> depending on the project)
>
>
>
> aerender Error: After Effects error: could not create 6046 x 4009 image 
> buffer.
>
>
>
> I tried changing memory and purge settings within after effects on the 
> local machines but that hasn't worked.  Can you script these into the 
> command line?
>
>
>
> I tried telling rush to re-que the frames automatically if they fail but 
> that's not working either forcing artists to baby-sit their renders so 
> they can manually re-que failed frames.  Anyone noticed this before?
>
>
>
> I'm using 102.42a8 and AE7 with the 7.0.1 update installed.
>
>
>
> 

Michael Oliver wrote:

Thanks a million Greg for that little code snippet. I put it into our after effects general submit and all of our renders are eventually completing (despite retries of 20 or more sometimes!).

	Wow.. that's certainly a 'down and dirty solution'.
	It's that random, huh?

	I guess that code snip beats users having to whap the que button
	over and over. But 20 retries.. yeez.

Hopefully Adobe will address this issue as well as compatibility with Intel Macs in the next release. Until then....

	

--
Greg Ercolano, erco@(email surpressed)
Rush Render Queue, http://seriss.com/rush/
Tel: (Tel# suppressed)
Fax: (Tel# suppressed)
Cel: (Tel# suppressed)