Tip: Force an After Effects Render to Fail (and Save!) on a Mac

No doubt you already make liberal use of the After Effects Auto-Save feature, which incrementally stores sub-versions of your current saved project in set increments of time. By default, the last 5 20 minute increments are saved, with the oldest replaced by the newest, but you can freely change the interval and number of saves. Still, what happens when your session hangs up and you have valuable unsaved information?

On a Mac, you're in luck if you take note of the following simple (if slightly opaque for the non-unix-inclined) command to trigger a segmentation fault. This is the system's way of saying that an application is trying to do something it shouldn't with memory or read/write and needs to be shut down.

A segfault can be triggered even when there is no threat to the system, and it has a key advantage over simply killing the applicaiton via Force Quit: a copy of the project is saved before the application goes down. So don't let that spinning beachball of death get you down; try this.

First, you need the process ID (PID) for After Effects. There are several way to get this; this simplest is to open Activity Monitor and look for the AE icon in the list, then look over to the PID column. You can also open Terminal and type "top" and look for After Effects in the list, with the PID listed to its left (to get out of that lilst view, use ctrl +C).

Copy or remember that number and from the Terminal command line type the following:

kill -SEGV [pid]