How come when rendering a project directly to QuickTime .MOV it can often fail/stop during render, while if first rendering out to an image sequence (TGA) and then rendering that to QuickTime .MOV it usually works?

 

Hi,

 

What sort of fails are you getting?  Are they specific to rendering quicktimes or are they After Effects rendering fails?

 

It's not hard to get rendering errors and fails but I can't think of many that are limited to rendering to Quicktimes.  The rendering process and the output process are separate.  I often run into problems with the number of particles in Particular, for example, but that's a general rendering error and it makes no difference if I'm rendering to a Quicktime or image sequence.  If you have motion blur cranked up too high (e.g. > 360 degrees, I think you can go up to 720) then you can get some pretty weird results and crashes but again, not limited to quicktimes.  And heaps of plugins can be quirky or unstable, especially any that use Open GL.  But again - not restricted to quicktimes.  Prior to CS5 there was always the risk of a memory buffer error, but since CS5 in 2010 that hasn't been a problem and was just as much a problem with image sequences as quicktimes.

 

If you are rendering to a network drive using CS 6 or earlier then you will get a fail if the file size goes over 2.15 GB.  It's a massive pain in the **** but I believe it has been fixed in CC.   Unfortunately I'm still on CS6 and am used to rendering to the desktop and then copying the finished quicktime to the network to avoid this stupid bug.  You won't have this problem rendering an image sequence to a network drive because an individual frame will not be over 2 gig.

 

The only other regular quicktime fail that I get is "After Effects error: internal verification failure, sorry! {could not find itemframe we just now checked in}".  This only happens when using multiprocessing, and I've only had it when doing a simple conversion of an image sequence to a Quicktime.  It's hugely frustrating because multiprocessing can make things 5 - 6 times faster.  It's a problem I've had at different companies, on different computers, and it still happens in After Effects CC.  Massively annoying and I hope it is fixed soon.

 

Are these the problems you're having or is it something else?  Basically - what sorts of error messages or problems are you getting?

 

 

-Chris