I'm trying to render a video less than 4 minutes in Media Encoder H264 (the default setting). Render is still going after 11 hours have already passed (I left it rendering over night), it's now only 3/4 through the render. All the effects and filters applied to the animation are all After Effect's own filters, no plugins used.

Using 16" M1 MaBook Pro with 64Gb RAM, 10 core CPU, 2 TB storage (1.82TB remain unused) ... operating system Ventura ... using most recent version of After Effects and Media Encoder (CC).

I did the same render earlier in the project, it took about an hour to render but left 2 artifacts (large jaggy geometric shapes suddenly appear in 2 places and look like distracting flashes of light until I slow down the video and see these large artifacts in 2 places in the video.

From what I'm able to view from the render thumbnail, Media Encoder seems to struggle rendering volumetric lighting and other fairly straight forward effects. I've also used puppet pins to animate. And the final thing I did before the problem showed up was add motion blur to some animated birds before beginning the render.

Where is that option in AE 22.2.1? I tried to update AE 23 but half of my plugins died in the process (M1 MBP)

There is no such option to set in AE Preferences/Output????
at least not Mac/AE 22.2.1

Thanks John! Great to hear. Hopefully a fix is in the near future.

Hi John how can we get a response from anyone in engineering about the Immersive Video options that your team removed? See above post in User Voice. Just give us any kind of communication even a “we dont care about 360 video anymore” would be appreciated to know that someone from Adobe has actually read the post. It’ll take like 2 minutes to post a response. Why does Adobe ghost and ignore its paying customers? We’re literally trying to help you improve your products, just a response too much to ask for?

John Colombo, rather than continue to be frustrated that a solution has not yet been found to fix this, I decided to make a test file that aborts upon attempting to render a version using ProRes 4444 with an alpha channel. I discovered that by placing a mask around the image and cropping off the area outside of it, there was a point at which I shrunk the mask small enough that it stopped aborting upon rendering to a ProRes with alpha. Hoping that helps provide a clue as to what is going on.

I know I can attach a file here but I am assuming it makes it public and I am not comfortable doing that, if you could please inform me as to where I may send this test file to your engineers. Thank you.

Hi John,

Yes running the latest OS + AE versions. Also affected in the Beta version of the app.

Any updates on this?

I have an older AEP project from last year that I created on a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro. After receiving my new M1 Max laptop a few weeks ago, I had to open that older project up on the new M1 Max and revise some assets. Frustratingly I have seen thoses error codes as well when I render. I am able to bypass the render queue and use media encoder with success.

I knew that AE was being redone to run native on the M1 Max, but I didn't realize that it would be slower than the 2015 model I had before. I know there is a beta of the new AE, but I haven't been able to use it yet since the rest of my team has not upgraded software yet.I can't wait for this all to be updated so I can get all the speeds promised with this new Mac.

Hi John. My M1 Max MBP arrived Friday and has MacOS 12.2.1, so the very latest version. The After Effects version is also the very latest 22.2. I tried downloading two earlier versions of AE (CC2020 and 2021) and both also caused the 9988 Compression error. I also downloaded the beta but unfortunately, the project in which I am seeing this issue is using RedGiant and Boris FX plug-ins that do not work in the beta version so I cannot really test it with the same conditions.

I used an M1 MacBook Air for nearly a month and never once ran into this problem, which is making me suspicious that it is something specific to the M1 Max (and maybe the M1Pro?). Could it be the Media Engine on that chip? Is After Effects somehow using that when generating ProRes files? Apple's description of what the Media Engine provides is as follows: "Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVS, ProRes and ProRes Raw. ProRes encode/decode engine. (among several other things).

Just trying to put two and two together here. Hope this helps a bit.

Hi Jase and Kevin,

Thank you both very much for reporting this issue. For clarification, are you both using the latest release build of After Effects 2022 ( v22.2 ) or the latest After Effects (Beta) builds ( v22.3 )? Additionally, what version of macOS are you using?

The latest After Effects (Beta) build run natively on M1 devices/Apple silicon. If you can, please give this a try in the native Beta builds and let us know if you experience the same issue.

Thanks for any further information,
- John, After Effects Engineering Team

For me on my M1 Max, the problem was only when rendering ProRes 4444 with alpha channels. When I rendered ProRes 4444 without an alpha channel, it rendered fine 100% of the time.

I was able to render it as a 16 bit TIFF sequence with an alpha channel and it rendered ok. When I then took those TIFF files into a brand new project and tried rendering it to 16 bit ProRes 4444 with an alpha channel, once again, the render aborted and threw up that 9988 Compressor format error. So, I could not blame any plug-ins or effects of any kind with a fresh project rendering out a TIFF sequence. Maybe that will help.

Also to note, I was able to get it to render ProRes 4444 with alpha from Media Encoder (after I did a fresh install of Media Encoder) and it rendered fine while still throwing up an error if I rendered inside After Effects (even after a fresh install of AE CC2022).

Edit: Media Encoder is not a solution that works. This problem is in every Adobe product that renders ProRes - AE, AE Beta, Media Encoder, Premiere