From: Greg Ercolano <erco@(email surpressed)>
Subject: Re: After Effects 7 Rendering
   Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:42:15 -0500

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)
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