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Mylenium

Welcome to the After Effects Error Code Database. This site is the collected wisdom of working with the program for the last 12 years ever since version 5.0 combined with some general computer knowledge dating back to the early 1990s put to good use and spiced with a dose of common sense. Many of the solutions apply to other commonly known problems with other Adobe programs as well and some of it is even relevant on a much broader, generic system level. I’m trying to keep things as current and complete as I possibly can and provide help, but please understand that I don’t have the resources to buy a new computer every 3 months just to investigate compatibility issues nor do I always have the time and inclination. I have a day job just like everyone else, suffer from a chronic disease that requires lots of medical attention and have to run my household and so-called “normal” life just like you do. When I’m not busy with any of that, I enjoy dabbling around and creating projects just for the fun of it or playing around with cool new plug-ins as a Beta tester. I also do hang around on a couple of forums to answer questions.

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After Effects warning: Unable to access resource ‘UI_ProgressDialog (type XML)’

. Application, Config and Install, Failure, Operating System . , ,

Message text

After Effects warning: Unable to access resource ‘UI_ProgressDialog (type XML)

Message interpretation:

Specific operating system resources are not accessible/ available.

Possible causes:

This error is exclusive to Mac OS X and has only crept up with more recent versions. It is caused by a conflict on the system whereby some installation and configuration options when installing specific apps or choosing specific options in some system areas use different language packages even if on the outside they appear to be e.g. just plain English. One such option is the system-wide spell checking that has been introduced in OS X 10.7.x (Lion). Since for instance US English and Canadian English use different writing for some words, things may be thrown off track when a wrong package is used and the system can’t find the correct language resources.

Resolution or workaround:

Start by making sure that your system is using a consistent language and region setting. If you use an exotic setting such as one for certain Caribbean islands with English, use a more generic like International English or US English. Make sure that this carries through to the aforementioned global spellchecker, timezone settings and so on. When you install programs that support multiple different languages, make sure to pick the same language your system runs in. You may need to reinstall After Effects just for that which can be done most easily by running the Creative Suite Cleaner Tool as explained here and then running the original installer again. This also extends to Creative Cloud where you should make sure to pick the correct language in the Adobe Application Manager‘s preferences. If these steps do not help or you cannot change the system language because you need a specific setting to work with other programs, you can try to remove extra languages in the application package. To do so, go to your system’s Applications folder, find After Effects, then right-click and choose Show Package Contents. You can then navigate to the folder containing the language resources and remove the ones you don’t need. When then launching the program and only one being present, the program will be forced to use it.

Note: Editing package contents may render the program completely defunct when something goes wrong or you delete the wrong parts. You may need to reinstall everything afterwards therefore to get it to work again. Do this at your own risk.

Unable to obtain dynamiclink server connection

. Failure, Operating System, User . , , ,

Message text

unable to obtain dynamiclink server connection

Message interpretation:

A process using DynamicLink could not connect to its child or parent process.

Possible causes:

This error most often occurs with tools such as the Warp Stabilizer or 3D Tracker that use separate client instances of the program to do their work in the background. When this connection is blocked or otherwise unavailable, the processes will fail. For a more detailed explanation of potential causes refer to this article and similar ones.

Resolution or workaround:

Work your way through the troubleshooting steps in the article linked above and see which one works for your situation.

After Effects error: After Effects crashed previously attempting to initialize OpenGL (…)

. Application, Config and Install, Crash, OpenGL . , , , ,

Message text

After Effects error: After Effects crashed previously attempting to initialize OpenGL. Consult the manufacturer of your graphics card for a compatible OpenGL driver.

Message interpretation:

After a crash, OpenGL is not available.

Possible causes:

This warning comes up after a previous crash, but only on the rare occasion when the crash happened only after the information from the GPU Sniffer has been written to your configuration files. In that case then the pertinent features will be disabled upon the next launch of the program for your own safety.

Resolution or workaround:

The warning is actually quite clear – get the latest or at least a compatible graphics driver from the manufacturer of your graphics card or chip set and configure it suitably.

After Effects error: (…) <5296><GPUManager> <2> Sniffer Result Code: 1.

. Blitpipe Errors, Crash . , , ,

Message text

After Effects error: Crash in progress. Last logged message was: <5296><GPUManager> <2> Sniffer Result Code: 1.

Message interpretation:

During program launch, the GPU functions could not be initialized and cause a crash.

Possible causes:

This error is mostly identical to this similar error. It only crashes at a later point but with a lower return code, meaning the crash is actually more severe in nature. The same basic rules laid out in the other article apply.

Resolution or workaround:

Refer to the information in this article.

After Effects error: (…) <6616> BEEp InitSoundPB <0> Vid rate ratios min,max: 1,1

. Blitpipe Errors, Crash, User . , ,

Message text

After Effects error: Crash in progress. Last logged message was: <6616> BEEp InitSoundPB <0> Vid rate ratios min,max: 1,1

Message interpretation:

There was an issue with the audio in your footage and it caused an encoding failure.

Possible causes:

This problem was noted so far twice in different contexts. First it was noted by a person using an MP3 file in a project. These files are conformed to the media cache and in this case the file seems to have been damaged and thus the conform happened over and over, slowly exhausting all available space in the cache and making After Effects think the data rate of the file was too high and out of spec. The second occurrence was when someone had created a comp at a wrong size and then forcibly tried to use a specific encoding preset to produce YouTube video from it.

Resolution or workaround:

For the first case the obvious solution is to not use MP3 files directly but instead open them in an audio processing program and convert them to a PCM (AIFF/ WAV) file. This avoids the conform process and in addition would bypass any internal problems that may exist in the file structure. When trying to output files for YouTube and other video services, make sure to adhere to their specifications to avoid conflicts. As per the example this means that not the 1280 x 1080 pixels resolution of a computer screen should be used but rather the “small” HD format with a 1280 x 720 pixels size and then one of the matching output module presets. that does of course not preclude using other resolutions, but you will have to manually change settings and in particular use a higher MPEG Level like 5.1 to remove data rate and size constraints that are defined in the MPEG specifications. Since the players on video sites are not tailored to these custom formats, it may also look odd and not make use of hardware acceleration features, so playback may be choppy. Therefore keep that in mind and weigh the potential loss of a few pixels by scaling and cropping content against these other disadvantages.

After Effects error: (…) <2524><unconstrainFPSifAppropriate><5> setting ADBE Video FPS constraint off

. Blitpipe Errors, Crash . , ,

Message text

After Effects error: Crash in progress. Last logged message was <2524><5> setting ADBE Video FPS constraint off.

Message interpretation:

There was an issue with your footage and it caused a crash.

Possible causes:

This error most commonly occurs when rendering from a compressed format to another compressed format such as working with a H.264 file from a digital (photo) camera and outputting it again to the same format to upload it to a video web site. Depending on which recording settings were used, framerates may get mixed up or audio get out of sync. Often this is also caused by internal structure issues such as GOPs not being spaced at predictable intervals when alternating between record and stop during filming, variable data rates or even mistakenly having set an unusual audio sample rate in the camera’s microphone. Another common source of the problem is also cameras using wrong framerate tagging on the footage itself, e.g. declaring 23.976 FPS while actually having recorded at full 24 or 25 FPS. This throws off the internal temporal logic of video processing tools, if they have no safeguards in place and do their own math and verification. Similarly, extensive metadata that some cameras produce can have bad side-effects.

Resolution or workaround:

As is obvious from the above, the best way to avoid the issue is to make sure to record footage with suitable settings in the first place, so refer to your camera’s manual and reset settings to defaults, if you mistweaked them. If you have no control over these settings because they are fixed, make sure to verify that you have the latest firmware. Sometimes such errors are known and get fixed, especially for the more expensive camera types. When you import your files into After Effects, make sure to verify the file properties in the footage interpretation. This especially pertains to framerate, embedded timecode, pulldown and metadata. If the timecode is discontinuous, turn off this feature and manually set your composition start time to reflect your actual timecode. For the metadata it may help to turn off XMP usage in the preferences, the footage interpretation as well as in the Output Module Settings on render. Since you are dealing with compressed footage and After Effects has quite a few limitations to produce such compressed formats, you should use external tools like Adobe Media Encoder and others to do the actual encoding, either by using the composition directly or rendering an intermediate format like a Quicktime clip using Animation or PNG compression. When audio appears to be the culprit, removing it or turning it off may already help the situation. If all of this fails, it may be time to transcode or convert the files using third-party tools like the various ffmpeg-based encoders such as Handbrake or MPEGStreamclip. This would also allow you to splice the audio from a file and treat it separately in specific tools to fix any problems it may have.