Communigate Pro AE-List@media-motion.tv Message 65723

I can’t tell you how many time we ran into this limit when doing multiplane animation on “In Saturn’s Rings”. When you want to be able to zoom/scale bitmaps, we had dozens of shots where 16-bit failed so we had to tile and collapse transformations to make it work to get around max comp sizes.

Biggest was a 100K by 50K. And that due to dynamic range of dim galaxies had to be done only in 32-bit linear.

From: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Sent: Thursday, November 7, 2019 6:54 AM
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] 2GB Comp Size Limit

Tim,

Just wondering what resolutions you’re dealing with to have this problem in 16 bit mode? Just today I tried to open a 12K square 32 bit EXR and got the 2GB error message, with AE saying it would take 2.1GB to open the file. But I haven’t seen the problem with 16 bit images. I have even wondered if it’s possible to run into the 2GB limit with an 8 bit image…

-Chris

On 7 Nov 2019, at 4:31 pm, Tim Sassoon <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

To any AE product people on the list,

The 2GB comp RAM allocation limit is starting to become a serious problem for After Effects. I strongly suggest that the trouble be taken to erase this rather low limit (32-bit internals?). A lot of us work on giant screen and multi-screen projects where AE’s editorial capabilities are a critical factor (my proxies are almost 8K), but then we might have to finish the show in Nuke or Fusion to be able to render complete scenes in 16 or 32-bit that could otherwise be finished just fine in AE. That’s my situation right now - saved as TIFF’s my output frames are over 2GB each.

Relatedly, AE's ProRes code seems to be a mixture of “old” and “new” ProRes - I can write a 15K ProRes 4444 file from AE just fine, but AE won’t read them reliably, which was a bit of a shock to find out. Fusion 16 reads AE's movies just fine, though.

On the plus side, I’ve been around long enough to have complained about the original 2K limit, the 4K limit, and now the 2GB limit :-)

Tim Sassoon
Venice, CA