Add back rendering support for H264 codec directly out of AE

For all things good, put quicktime output of H264 directly back into After Effects!

Please, add back a simple light codec like h264. Preferably h264. AME is garbage and I would never use it except I have to now. The decision to remove this was ludicrous. No here we are 8 years later. Clients and studios still ask for h264. I have to wait for AME to get its **** together. It’s slow. It’s awkward. The default settings are trash. It feels like a 30 year old program. Just let me render from the render queue and trim the fat for crissakes. Get all of those effects and codecs no one uses out of there.

As Adobe Media Encoder doesn't render the same way After Effects does this is a critical feature. If whatever causes AME to render differently than after effects was fixed I would be OK with just using Adobe Media Encoder.

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911308-media-encoder/suggestions/34857124-fix-whatever-causes-effects-to-render-differently

Media Encoder: Slow To Launch. Slow to add items into the Queue. Slow to change encoding presets/setting. Non-Intuitive to change render quality and image sequence naming in Media Encoder. Inconsistency between AE Render Queue features/settings and ME. Currently using ME is a big time suck and kills momentum. Please return the H264 feature to AE.

SERIOUSLY!!! PLEASE ADD IT BACK!

H264 is still the most widely used codec & the lack of exporting it straight from AE is hallucinatory,
There is a free AE plugin similar to After codecs called voukoder which evolves quickly & contains many HW acceleration encodings.
https://www.voukoder.org/

Looks like Adobe needs some advanced AI algorithms to bring it back.... or maybe they spent all their money on Tiffany Haddish wage and have no more budget for this. 😛

Hey Antoine, yes, I have! I think it's a great plugin, but I don't really see why I have to spend extra money to use a basic export feature.

Ferdi did you have a look at AfterCodecs ? https://autokroma.com/AfterCodecs/

While it's true that you should not use H264 as a production format, in the real world you share preview renders with clients and superiors that don't need to be excellent quality. Quick H264 export from After Effects was perfect for this. Now, if you just want your art director to take a look at an edit of ******-quality playblasts, you need to render them lossless - totall overkill - and compress them afterwards. Super annoying extra step.