After Effects crashes while rendering

Question

Hi all,
We have been experiencing regular crashes while rendering on 9 different Mac systems.
We would start the render and then, all of a sudden, AE would crash.
Trying to restart, AE hangs at MediaCore initializing.
We actually need to do a hard shutdown to get the machine to reboot.
So my question is:
Could AE not release the media cache upon crashing thus blocking us to restart the app without having to reboot the machine?
We are running AE in multiproc mode with 4 GB memory allocation, which actually uses 3 procs.
I have tried bringing the memory allocation down to 3 GB on some of the systems, but it doesn't seems to make much difference.
Finally, we do not crash every time we render. It is very random.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Rene

Answer 1

Hey Todd,
Sorry for the late reply, answers below:
What exact version of After Effects? 12.2.0.52 but we also use CS 5.5 (mainly for the feature where you can send your camera information to C4D, something that is not in the CC version... pitty)
Have you installed the recent updates? This is the latest update...
What operating system? Mac OSX 10.8.5
Tell us about your computer hardware. 2 x 6 cores CPUS, 24 Gb RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5870 GFX, 5 internal drives (4 of them are part of internal hardware raid with internal raid controller)
What versions of drivers for your graphics hardware do you have installed? No CUDA since it is ATI, 01.00.436
Do you have any third-party I/O hardware : AJA Kona 3G with either driver 1.47 or 1.49
What kind(s) of source footage? When telling about your source footage, tell us about the codecs, not just the container types. It is a combination of a bunch of them: Animation codec into .mov wrapper, tga sequences, png files, we render to uncompressed .mov files for air.
If you are getting error message(s), what is the full text of the error message(s)? No, just the beach ball of death...
What were you doing when the problem occurred? They mainly occur when rendering sequences.
Has this ever worked before? It is very intermittent and does not happen every day. Plus, since we are in crunch time, AE is being used 24/7, so that may not help either.
What other software are you running? C4D, Photoshop, Illustrator, both in the CC and CS6 or CS5.5
Do you have any third-party effects or codecs installed? We have sapphire and Knoll lens flare, but crashes happens if we use them or not.
Are you using OpenGL features in After Effects? Not to my knowledge.
Does the problem only happen with your final output, RAM preview, or both? Render
Are you using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing? Yes we do, most of the machines have it set with 4Gb memory allocation, but others have it set to 3 Gb.
Are you using the ray-traced 3D renderer? No, we are not.
If the problem is with output, give your exact output settings (both render setting and output module settings). Unfortunately, I do not have this as our artists are working and I cannot really stop them as we have things to get out to air for early morning. I will get this info next time we have the issue.
What is the exact sequence of steps that you are taking? Just sending the render out to the queue and starting and it will either crash to desktop or stay there doing nothing.
My biggest concern is why can't we just restart the app. It will always lock up while initializing MediaCore. We have our mediacaches set for 42 Gb on our main bootup drive, which is big enough to handle it. And after the crash, when we try to reboot, the machine will get to the grey Mac screen and just sit there. Have to hard shutdown the machine to have it come back up...
Let me know if you need more info.
Thanks,
Rene