General Specialist not only has an excellent name, but Jonas is supporting that name with excellent original content.

The latest: “how to avoid the dreaded image buffer error“, with background on why it occurs, and a collection of tweaks and techniques for preventing this from happening.

Unlike many other compositing and 3D programs, After Effects doesn’t use a scanline renderer. Instead it renders each layer and then stacks it on top of the previously rendered layers. While this gives great performance for layers that can be cached and use several times without re-rendering, it can spell disaster when you are trying to work with bigger sources and output resolutions.

While you can use Shake to zoom in on a giant 30.000 by 30.000 pixel image on an old machine, doing the same thing in After Effects takes a bit of imagination, plus a knowledge of how to tweak AE’s memory settings. Basically, it comes down to the memory being to fragmented for AE to be able to hold the entire frame/layer in one contiguous piece of RAM. Here’s how you avoid that from happening.

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