Alternatives to After Effects / That sinking feeling

[LetsEditThis]

Trying to get some work done after a long day of child care. I sit down, I being and I need to make my first dynamic link of the night from Premiere Pro. 

CEPHtmlengine.exe would like to let me know that it's not going to behave, something that form what I can tell doesn't actually effect the program but rather calls home to those experts whom I give money every month. 

What can be done so I don't NEED these program changes that literally happen without my knowledge. Pallete support confirmed this week that it can update silently, so my extension for my control modules stopped working one day. Really great that there's not notice other then something working LESS. 

The problems with this .exe date back to 2016, well they seem to be back? 

[Rick Gerard]

To be completely honest, I always have auto-updates turned off. I also routinely roll back one or more builds using the Creative Cloud app if I have problems. I also keep all available builds of AE, Premiere Pro, AME, Audition, Photoshop, and Illustrator. That almost always saves headaches. Before I do an OS update I clone my boot drive so I can roll back to a previous version of my OS in a matter of minutes instead of hours. 

As far as alternatives to After Effects, I will be honest here too. For some kinds of effects and some kind of tracking, and some kind of visual effects and compositing, I use Davinci. For some of my 3D work I use Blender (http://blender.org), for some I use C4D, but for most of the visual effects work I do I use After Effects because I have a lot more tools for AE and for some things, AE just does a lot better job in a lot less time. The right tool for the job depends entirely on what you are trying to do. Trying to create one type of cartoon-style animation in After Effects is a nightmare compared with creating the same kind of animation using Character Animator. Change the style slightly and After Effects is a very reasonable tool. Change the style again and you are going to be much better off with Blender or C4D. For a lot of my 3D work, I use Element 3D from Video Copilot, for other work I use C4D Lite, for other kinds of 3D work I use Blender, and occasionally I will jump into C4D. Again, it all depends on the job.

As far as Dynamic Link goes, here are a few facts you should consider because of the limitations of the current releases. 

• A dynamically linked comp in Premiere Pro will always take longer to render than it would to render that same comp to a suitable DI using a production format like ProRez or DNxHR and drop that rendered comp into the Premiere Pro sequence
• You should never include more than one shot (clip) in a Premiere Pro sequence when you Create an After Effects Comp from selected unless you have to make a transition between those shots that you cannot make in Premiere Pro because you are wasting render time
• Dynamic Link from Premiere Pro always opens a copy of After Effects in the background and background to render the shot and Background Rendering may not fully utilize GPU accelerated effects and could lead to color management issues

If my AE comp will not render for a ram preview at full resolution at the rate of several frames per second I always render the comp using the Render Queue. Always. I routinely have composites that take more than 10 or 15 seconds a frame to render and those comps could easily take three or four times as long to render if they were dynamically linked back to Premiere Pro. 

I hope some of these suggestions help. After Effects, if properly managed, can be a very good and efficient tool, but if you expect it to do everything well, you are going to be as disappointed as you would be if you tried to build a bookshelf and all you had was a screwdriver.

[LetsEditThis]

|To be completely honest, I always have auto-updates turned off. I also routinely roll back one or more builds using the Creative Cloud app if I have problems.
I do try to practice this and this seems to happen to me on the most recent as well as the previous non (.1) build. 

| The right tool for the job depends entirely on what you are trying to do.
Having done a little bit with blender I really enjoy it's lighting abilites when making plates for green screen presenters, it's miles better then lighting effects in AE and Pr. For the most part I find myself doing the editor / animator job of basic shape and layer manipulation. Premiere has come a ways in this however the mind set is still "this track matte would mask right away in AE" 

|You should never include more than one shot (clip) in a Premiere Pro sequence when you Create an After Effects Comp from selected unless you have to make a transition between those shots that you cannot make in Premiere Pro because you are wasting render time

This is certainly one of the ways I DO find myself using it as I want to quickly animate something together ontop of a selection of shots and time it with a piece of audio. So i double it up in the timeline (in case the link doesn't work) and go from there, bringing into AE all of the items, in the clips I need right into a new comp. 

| but if you expect it to do everything well, you are going to be as disappointed as you would be if you tried to build a bookshelf and all you had was a screwdriver.

I'm a master Ikea assembler! How dare you! (kidding) 

I would really say i'm using AE in such a basic, or what seems to be basic fashion. I've done months of basic layer animation comps and had it been pretty flawless. Here i have about 40 things and 4 linked comps and all of the sudden it needs to have the CEMHtmlengine.exe process open and closed every 10 seconds despite having full permission and being started in admin mode. 

I appreciate all the tips though. This was a small moment to get some work done after a long day. 

[OussK]

For me, after effects is the most powerful tool for motion graphics, maybe yes you can find some more stable tools but I prefer AE because there is a loot of resources especially in terms of expression and script, another solution you can try apple motion with final cut pro, but you should use mac in this case. 

[Byron Cortez]

In the end, applications are tools and you should use the one you feel most comfortable with and know how to use in a more productive way. To be able to define which application is convenient for you, you must go through several and then with experience you define which is your main one and you have others as an alternative. I join Rick and Oussk's comments because After Effects is not perfect (no application is, in fact nothing is) but it has many yesterdays and knowing how to adjust it in the best way will give you many satisfactions throughout your journey as a post-producer .