After Effects error!! In need of some serious help.

[mackdadd]

maybe it's just a single bad frame? try RAM previewing a section after the frame it stops on. if it works, try re-rendering just that one frame out of Maya. other than that, no idea.

[shirak23]

Heh heh, thanks Mackdadd, I just figured that out as well! Oy, I hate being on a deadline, every little things causes a mini heart attack! Thanks again for the quick reply!

[hospadam]

That's the whole point of rendering in image sequences... or one of the benifits I suppose. If you get a bad frame, you only have to rerender a very small part, not the whole thing.

[shirak23]

Okay, I spoke too soon. No matter what I do it gives me the error on the same frame. I've tried rendering it on its own, in different formats and converting to a targa file like the rest and replacing it, but no luck! I am pulling my hair out. If I import it on its own, no problem, but in the file sequence, it is the ONLY frame that doesn't work?! WHAT THE HELL?!?!?!?
I think I might have a solution, but what the hell.

[mackdadd]

no idea, but if you can import it on it's own, import the frames before it as a sequences, it on its own, and the frames after as a sequence. then put the in order in a pre-comp and you're good to go. yeah, weird error. sometimes a work around is the best you can do. good luck!

[hospadam]

Here's a little trick I've used before :)

If you're running your image sequnece at 30 fps, then just take the bad frame, and delete it. Then, duplicate either the frame before or after it, and rename it to the missing frame.

Technically, you will actually see a little skip, but, with only one frame, it will always be chalked up to a little glitch, and thats even if someone notices it. Chances are, only you (who knows where it's at) will even notice it.

That will work, and I think you'll be happy with the results.

[scrimski]

If this would be too noticeable, you may merge the frame before and the follow up frame into Photoshopas two layers, set the transparency of the top layer to 50%, flatten the image and save it with the filename of your bad frame.
Cheap little manual frame blending

[shirak23]

Hey, thanks for all the cool tips! Always good to have a few more tricks in the bag, especially ones you never would have thought of on your own!

Okay, I figured it out. It's not AE, it's Maya. Here's what happened:

I was batch rendering and for various reasons had to stop it here and there. I waited until it said frame n (or whatever #) was completely rendered and then cancelled the batch render.

Well, if it is not completely rendered it will incorrectly parse in AE when it tries to render it. Like a dumba** I was looking at the wrong frame to re-render as my animation started at frame 40 and AE looked at it as frame 0 which is why no matter how I rendered it it wouldn't work. *whew*

So for anyone else who might have run into this problem out of Maya into AE, there you go. Just make sure the frame after the one where you really need to cancel batch render is the one you cancel on. Problem solved!

Thanks again!

[hospadam]

I just always manage this issue (I agree sometimes it can be confusing) by just changing my frame range in my render settings. Also, with Maya, I've always noticed that 'bad frames' always seem to have a significant difference in frame file size. In fact, on large renders, when its 'done', i usually always sort by file size, and see if there are any that are vastly different. I'd imagine, if you'd look at thta file, you'd see that you were still having a problem with the frame never changing.

These problems are actually good things, they teach you the way to get around them/prevent them next time :)

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