Color Finesse Displays “Frame Buffer Allocation Failed in Render” in After Effects

Article Number 420114 Last Edited 1/29/07 Keywords color finesse, colorociter, frame buffer, memory allocation

Platforms/Versions Color Finesse 1.5 or later on Macintosh OS X or Windows XP. Problem With Color Finesse applied to one or more clips, After Effects will stop rendering with the error message “Frame buffer allocation failed in render” or “Could not create image buffer.” Solution The error messages are simply a long-winded way of saying “out of memory.” There may be sufficient free memory available, but if there is not a contiguous area large enough to fulfill Color Finesse’s request (because memory has become fragmented over time) then the request is denied and you see the error message. Although you may have more memory installed in your system, After Effects is limited by the operating system to approximately 3.5GB total memory. After Effects divides this memory up and uses different areas for different purposes. When a plug-in such as Color Finesse asks for memory, it comes from a specific pool of memory. If that pool of memory does not have a sufficiently large contiguous area of free memory, the request is denied. This is why even systems with 16GB of memory can experience this error. This situation is not unique to Color Finesse, but can occur with any sufficiently large and complex a project. Because Color Finesse allocates large floating-point pixel buffers, it does use more memory than many other plug-ins. The solution is to reconfigure After Effects’ memory usage using the Memory & Cache pane of After Effects’ Preferences.The above screen capture shows good starting values for these preferences. Set Maximum Memory Usage to 120%. While this may seem odd, the idea is to allow After Effects to slow down (due to memory paging) when it runs low on physical memory, rather than failing with an out-of-memory error. Set Maximum RAM Cache Size to 60%. This controls how much of the total memory is reserved for RAM cache and frame buffer usage. The 60% value is a good starting point for general usage, but it is this parameter we will adjust if the Frame Buffer Allocation error persists (see below). Enable the Disk Cache and assign it to a folder on a fast disk drive, preferably one other than your system or source footage drives. The Maximum Disk Cache Size is not critical, but 8000MB is a good starting point. Be sure you have that much free space on the drive you choose. The idea of using After Effects’ Disk Cache is that it gives another “safety valve” when memory space becomes tight. Better to roll some items out to disk and pay a slight performance penalty than fail altogether. On Windows systems, there is an additional checkbox labeled Prevent DLL Address Space Fragmentation. This should be selected, as it will cause After Effects to manage DLLs so as to reduce memory fragmentation. The above values are a good starting point and will generally suffice to avoid memory fragmentation issues. If the problem persists, try reducing the Maximum RAM Cache Size value 5-10% at a time until the Frame Buffer Allocation error is eliminated. It might seem like reducing this memory is exactly what you don’t want to do, but by reducing the amount of memory available, you reduce fragmentation. The performance hit from the smaller amount of memory is usually small. Adjusting the Maximum RAM Cache Size value is typically the best approach to eliminating the problem. When you are dealing with projects with very large frames, you can also reduce the number of undo levels (located in After Effects’ General Preferences pane) to save memory. You can also quit and restart After Effects to reset memory usage before rendering.   Related Documents

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