Suppressing the new AE Crash Options after an unregular application exit.

Maris

After Effects is trying to be helpful and shows you a dialog box after an unregular exit.
You can check effects, disable effects or start in safe mode. All good and fine.

Not if you run Templater Bot instances.

I havent found an option to disable that modal dialogue yet. Anyone have a good solution to suppress that?

Jeff

@maris

After taking a look at the latest update and consulting with our development team, it doesn’t seem like Adobe has included any programmatic way to close this new dialogue window. This means that, unfortunately, there isn’t really any way for Templater to suppress that options box from coming up in the case of a crash.

We can submit a feature request to Adobe, but it’s probably going to end up being easier to troubleshoot what’s causing the After Effects crashes in the first place since resolving that would keep us from having to deal with the “Crash Repair Options” dialogue window.

If that’s a solution you’d like to explore, please feel free to post some additional details about the sorts of crashes that we’re seeing here or get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com.

Thanks!

Maris

@jeff Hey Jeff, thanks for getting back.

Arie has already upvoted my Adobe Forum Post so i figured you were taking a look at things.
We are rebooting our machines every night because we have experienced issues with AE instances that ran for a long time.

I think the crashes are cause by either the tasked reboot force quitting AE or by the fact that we have three instances of Templater Bot running the same project at once and the way that AE checks for chashes is some kind of quit statement in the projectfile itself.

Because once one project is opened, we get the Crash Options dialogue on instance 2 and 3 (run with the -m parameter).

Instance 2 and 3 generate on demand previews that are shown to the creators in our frontend. We are running two instances to speed up the polling of our json data (still limited to 0.2 min) to have a result asap.

I guess the issue is with having the same project open multiple times.

I could fork a “preview project” but i really dont want to do that everytime there are updates to the template.

I just want adobe to not fk with my day

At the moment i’m thinking of going back to 23.1 or 23.0 and just disabling updates.

Jeff

@maris

We’re currently working to see if there’s a way around this, but I did have a few suggestions that might be helpful in the meantime.

First, I think it would be helpful if we could figure out whether the Crash Repair Options dialogue is being caused by all three instances of Templater accessing the same project or whether it’s just a flag that is set when the AE instances are closed abruptly.

In your last message, you stated that once one project is opened, the other two instances immediately throw the Crash Repair Options dialogue. This doesn’t seem to be in line with the way that we’re seeing that flag operate, so I think it would be helpful if we could try booting up each instance of Templater in a slightly different order to confirm that the issue doesn’t occur unless the same file is accessed simultaneously.

If that’s the case, it might be useful to set the second and third instances of Templater to load up with a “dummy” project and then use the aep reserved column to switch them over to the main project file. This would allow us to boot the system up in a way that avoided accessing the same project simultaneously.

Another option that we might consider would be the use of a rudimentary Event Script to exit After Effects gracefully at the end of each day.

This is extremely basic, but I did some testing today with this script:

var exitFlag = $D.job.get("exit");
if (exitFlag === "y") {
	app.project.close(CloseOptions.DO_NOT_SAVE_CHANGES);
	app.quit();}

and got some excellent results. I registered this script to the “After creating output” event under “Output Processing”. It checks for a value in the Data Source named “exit” (with no quotes) and then closes After Effects if that flag is set to “y” (also with no quotes).

Using this method or something similar might allow us to close out Templater gracefully with a specific Job added at the end of each day when the reboot is set to occur. This might get us around the Crash Repair Options dialogue when the system is booted back up.

We’ll keep looking for better ways to get around this issue on this side, but I thought I’d throw this information out there in case it was worthwhile.

Thanks,

Jeff

Maris

@jeff

Well… i didnt know THAT existed.

Jon

@maris What is wild is that I looked through every option in the console, but somehow overlooked that one. That is very helpful to know.

Jon

@Maris adding for future reference, since the Adobe forum link appears to be dead, and don’t want the info lost to history.

There is a hidden developer Console panel that is accessible by hitting ctrl + f12. From there you can open the menu on the panel and navigate to Debug Database View. In that view, you can search for the option AEDebugShowPreviousCrashWarning. By default it will be checked/true, but you should be able to disable it by unchecking that option.