After Effects error: "strange situation"

@jcburns is reporting his favorite Adobe After Effects error:

This one can't be found at Mylenium's Error Code Database, though a similar one was reported by Alan Shisko. There's a few more screenshots of error messages at the Mograph Wiki. For fun see Crash report love letters.

Todd Kopriva has a tip if you want to dig deeper: "Search for the word ‘error’ plus the error code surrounded by double quotation marks, like this search for the error code 7 :: 66. Implicit in this tip is that you should be using the After Effects Community Help search to do your search." If you're really into Jedi mind tricks you can add a Console Log to AE.

More generally and in the past at least, Troubleshooting After Effects (all versions) at General Specialist was handy. See also the previous entry What do to when AE crashes, which was really relaying a request for using the Crash Reporter, which you wouldn't see with error dialogs but only if AE crashes.

Jedi Mind Trick: Add a Console Log to AE

Everyone suffers from Jedi Mind Tricks by our favorite apps. Here's a video tip (from Premiere Pro User Group's Blip.tv) on how you can add a Console Log to see what After Effects is doing under the hood (put an empty text file called After Effects Log.txt in your preference folder, a tab will appear in AE when next launched):

Beyond curiosity, the Console Log may help in troubleshooting -- which was noted earlier by Jonas Hummelstrand at the end of his Troubleshooting After Effects (all versions). And Lutz Albrecht has already investigated many of the possible errors and provides a 30-page list of After Effects error codes with possible solutions in his Mylenium Error Code Database. Some of the entries reflect tech notes at Adobe, but it's nice to have the errors listed in one place.

AE Error Code Database & 'Troubleshooting'

Mylenium’s After Effects Error Code Database has been updated with more obscure goodness. Some of the entries reflect tech notes at Adobe, but it's nice to have the errors listed in one place.

Also very handy is Troubleshooting After Effects (all versions) at General Specialist. See also the previous entry What do to when AE crashes, which was really relaying a request for using the Crash Reporter, which you wouldn't see with error dialogs but only if AE crashes. That said, AE is a remarkably stable and accurate application.

Update: Todd Kopriva added advice to Mylenium's plea for common sense on forums.

What do to when AE crashes

After Effects region of interest guest Paul Uusitalo (After Effects quality engineer) says that After Effects and the Adobe Crash Reporter need your help.

If you've crashed you may have seen this dialog, which is more convenient than later sending a note to aebugs @adobe.com. Instead of canceling, the AE team is asking for at least a short description of what you were doing at the time of the crash and an e-mail contact.

One CS4 bug that might come up on the Mac is a crash if you have the Script UI panel open when exiting AE. To fix this, undock or close the script-generated UI panel. Chris Meyer adds (update): "I found once I had crashed with them open, I always crashed even if I closed them in subsequent boots. I had to remove them, quit once successfully, reinstall them, then make sure I never quit again with them open."

You can also look at Mylenium's After Effects Error Code Database: Overview, Troubleshooting and Solutions, search the Adobe Knowledgebase (try "crash" in AE), and post on the Adobe Forums. Also, you're entitled to a certain number of free calls for "installation issues, basic usage questions, and troubleshooting unexpected behavior for documented features." There's also a chance the problem is on the user side, like bad RAM or something!

Update (Jan '09): Michael Coleman allays fears in Adobe Crash Reporter Privacy.

Apple Feedback/Bug Reports

As reported on Final Cut-L, you can report problems to Apple at: http://www.apple.com/feedback/

But the official portal for reporting bugs, like the render problem or Media Manager issues in Final Cut 6, is here: http://bugreporter. apple.com

Apple engineers are required to read the official reports, which require registering for a free developers account. Darrin Cardani explains further:

'As Philip mentioned, we don't work on any bug that's not in our bug database, even if lots of people are discussing it on forums. I don't know of any other developers in our group who read the various internet user forums regularly, though I think a few do. So it's entirely possible that nobody at Apple has any idea there's a problem.
In addition, you need to supply as detailed a description of what you're doing when the render gets lost as possible, and what exactly you mean by lost. Just saying, "Final Cut Pro is losing renders" is almost useless in a bug report because we can't tell if it's happening because the user is doing something to cause it to happen, or because of an actual bug. So we'll need very detailed steps to reproduce the problem.'

Adobe Feature Request/Bug Report Form

With AE and the Production Premium CS3 suite shipping, now is the time to make feature requests, so visit Adobe's Feature Request/Bug Report Form if you think something's missing in any of your favorite apps. Bug fixes are important too and could be squeezed into potential point releases.

Feature Request/Bug Report Form

With AE and the Production Premium suite just shipping, now is the time to make feature requests, so visit Adobe's Feature Request/Bug Report Form if you think something's missing.
Bug fixes are important too and could be squeezed into a potential point release because there will probably be one before the next dot-zero release -- which might be 1-1/2 years out.

AE7 out of memory problems

on the AE-list, Michael Natkin's advice on AE7 out of memory problems:

'You can generally help these problems by going to Preferences > Memory and Cache and *lowering* the value of Maximum RAM Cache Size. You are probably running into a situation where memory is fragmented, just like can happen to your hard drive. Try knocking it down 5-10% at a time til the problem goes away. (And yes, we are aware this is not really good :).'
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