Hello Folks,
We're unable to start renders when utilising After Effects 2018 (version 15.0.0) in render only mode, i.e. with the empty text file "ae_render_only_node.txt" in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Adobe and C:\Users\{user}\Documents, as described in:
Automated rendering and network rendering in After Effects
Our render farm management system is Pixar's Tractor and our render nodes are running Windows 10 pro x64.
Unfortunately, not much of a stack trace is generated when the renders fail, nothing in Windows Event Viewer and the log captured in Tractor displays just a few lines, for example:
aerender version 15.0.0x180
Using DXGI: Device: "NVIDIA Quadro...
After Effects can't continue: unexpected failure during application startup
====[2017/11/22 10:54:03 process complete, exit code: 0]====
Exit code 0 means a job completes successfully but this is not the case, as the images are not created. Subsequent frames in a job also do not get created.
On a few jobs we may get the following extra line in the log:
After Effects error: After Effects crashed previously attempting to initialize OpenGL. Consult the manufacturer of your graphics card for a compatible OpenGL driver.
This is odd as we've never created any compositions which utilise any GPU resources. I've also swapped out cards and updated (then rolled back) GPU drivers, none of which has had any effect.
Running AE 2017 in render only mode works flawlessly both in Tractor and manually in a command prompt window.
Running an AE 2018 render manually in a command prompt window does work! But I don't think Tractor is at fault as we haven't changed it in any way (and previous versions of AE all work fine with Tractor). The command I run manually is exactly the same as the one submitted by Tractor:
"C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe After Effects CC 2018/Support Files/aerender.exe" -project C:/mnt/workspace/projects/TractorTestWin10/TractorTestWin10.aep -comp "\"Comp 5\"" -s 0 -e 25
Has AE 2018 been changed in any way that prevents it running commands from render farm managers like Tractor? Tractor is run as a service - could this be an issue?
If anyone can shed any light I'd be very grateful and let me know if I can provide anymore info.
Many thanks
Sam Taylor