Animation export is choppy on YouTube (only)

Question

Hello everybody,

I never worked in Adobe After Effects CC 2015 before, and now I wanted to add some rain animation to image that I made in Photoshop. So I opened .psd file in AE, added CC Rainfall effect to image and it was pretty much I all needed. I rendered video by adding it to Render Queue, I couldn't find .mp4 as a format so I chose .AVI and after a 2 hours of rendering I got a 4:25 minute long video with size of 46 GB (haha). Not only that, but it was choppy in my video player. Resolution of video is 1920x1090, 30 fps.

Later I found out about Adobe Media Encoder, so I converted that same video to h264 mp4 format and it had a smooth playback in my video player. Now, when I uploaded it to YouTube the animation of rain is choppy, you can check it out here: rain animation test - YouTube . It plays fine for a few seconds, then it stucks, plays fne again and so on.

Can you tell me is there any specific render settings I should use for this?

Thanks in advance!
Miloš

Rick Gerard · Answer

The first render did not playback smoothly because it is lossless. It is not designed to be used in a player, it is designed to be used as a digital intermediate so no quality is lost when you re-compress the video. The file size is normal.

The YouTube video looks just fine. A four and a half minute video of rain on a still photo is really long. Most of my AE comps are under seven seconds because the average cut in a movie happens in less than seven seconds. AE is for creating shots, not editing.

Also, the rain effect is so subtle that I had to turn up the screen brightness all the way to see it. If it is not smooth when you play it back from YouTube two things may be going on. If you just uploaded the video and tried to play it back YouTube may have still been processing the video. Even when you use the h.264 YouTube Presets your video will be re-compressed and prepared for streaming by YouTube. The second problem may be bandwidth or performance issues with your machine and your browser. The video was perfectly smooth as I watched it.

What is the purpose of that shot? If you are going to put something on top of it I would have rendered about 10 seconds and then looped the video in an NLE for the final edit. That would have saved you hours of editing time. If the shot really needs to be 4:24 then something else needs to happen to make it tell some kind of a story. Otherwise, you could have just posted 10 or 20 seconds of video and instructed the media player to loop it continuously.

You should also spend some time studying video formats and compression. If you plan on making videos you should be very familiar with the production and distribution process. The same format (mp4) will not work well for both.

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