the “aerender” process from After Effects 2024 (24.1.0) on Mac (apple silicon) immediately crashes and generates a crash report when launched from a deadline worker, but not from copy/pasting the full command directly into a terminal as the current user. This crash report mentions rosetta and deadline being the parent process.
AE 2024 (24.0.3) does work fine with deadline.
AE 2024 removed “open using rosetta” as an option if you “get info” in finder. However, you can, using a terminal command, force it to open using rosetta in 24.0.3. In 24.1.0 this hack no longer works and exits with the error “illegal hardware instruction”
What I believe is happening, is that the deadlineworker is launching aerender using rosetta and that is failing as of 24.1.0. Just a shot in the dark, is this because all deadline parent processes run using rosetta, and the child process (After Effects) also has to be launched with rosetta?
If this is the case, deadline either needs to implement native Apple silicon workers, or somehow implement the sandbox in a way that AE can be launched natively without using rosetta. Currently we have a workaround which is to keep using 24.0.3, but this is obviously not a good permanent solution. I have a post on the adobe forums as well, and an adobe employee is also looking into it.
I don’t know if AE has to be launched with Rosetta, but given it’s being started as a child of a processes that is managed by Rosetta there may not be a way around that.
That’s an interesting problem… I guess a way to check, if you turn off “open using rosetta” does AE launch in “Apple Silicon” mode? I don’t know if Adobe was bundling universal binaries for After Effects but maybe… There should be a “Kind” column in Activity Monitor that shows if it’s running under Rosetta (shows as “Intel”) or native (shows as “Apple”).
This would just to be to confirm/deny that Rosetta is forced for subprocesses but I don’t expect that it is.
Adobe has removed the checkbox for “Open Using Rosetta” in AE2024. However, in version 24.0.3 and earlier, you could dig into the app binary and launch in rosetta with the command arch -x86_64 path/to/ae/binary . As of 24.1.0, this is now broken and you get an “illegal hardware instruction” error.
In the crash report generated by aerendercore 24.1.0 as launched by deadline, rosetta is mentioned multiple times.
I think what we need is a way for aerender to be launched natively from the deadline sandbox rather than through rosetta. I’ve posted this to the adobe forums and the last I heard from an adobe employee was “This may need to be handled on the Deadline side by having Deadline run AE natively on Apple silicon devices, rather than under Rosetta.”
Is there a plan for deadline to move to native apple silicon soon? I know it’s developed cross-platform, but eventually Apple will discontinue rosetta support entirely, so I figure it’s at least on the roadmap.
Something interesting we learned in another ticket. When checking the ‘Kind’ column in the activity monitor DeadlineWorker10 is getting run as an ‘Intel’ process, where ‘aerendercode’ is getting run as ‘Apple’.
This implies that After Effects isn’t getting run through Rosetta, but the Worker is.
Is that what you see on your render node? Maybe crash report you mention is referencing rosetta because AE is a part of the process tree the Worker has started?
The crash is actually not even from aerendercore which is the guts of after effects that is doing the rendering, but aerender which is the binary that gets called from the deadline plugin with the various arguments for project, frame range etc. that launches the project. In the crash report you can see that the parent process is “deadlinesandbox.exe” and in activity monitor, deadlinesandbox.exe shows up as intel. aerender crashes instantaneously upon launch and doesn’t stick around long enough to show up in activity monitor. From the crash reports though, you can see that the “cpu type” is listed as “x86-64”. The thread that crashes on aerender is the main thread fwiw. Also this has been tested this morning on After Effects 24.2.1 so the latest version still has this problem.
We installed Deadline 10.3.2.1 since the release notes say that it supports After Effects 2024, but on Mac we are getting what looks like it is potentially this same error. Does Deadline support the current version of After Effects 2024 on Apple Silicon Mac computers, or is the only way to use After Effects with Deadline on Mac to lock our After Effects version at 24.0.3, which is no longer a viable solution?
Here’s a workaround I just learned from a customer much more experienced with MacOS to work around AE not working via Rosetta:
Create a file to launch aerender via arch, like this file. If your copy of aerender is elsewhere, make sure to update the path accordingly.
aerender_arch_arm64:
Replace aerender in your AE2024 entry in the Monitor under Tools → Configure Plugins → After Effects with the path to the aerender_arch_arm64 (if you used the same example name). If it’s higher in the list it will be used if it’s present on the machine.
Hi there, a followup to this - we thought the fix was working well, but we have discovered that as tasks are processed, we are now ending up with large amounts of abandoned aerendercore processes, which over time accumulate enough to significantly degrade render machine performance. Is this a known issue and is there a way to fix this? It doesn’t seem to happen on every task; some of them are completing with a clean exit that leaves no abandoned processes behind.
