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Render out of AE CC no h.264 option render queue

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
June 19, 2013
10 replies
191962 views

In cs6 you could directly render out of AE to h.264 via render queue.

Now there is no option in the dropdown, only avi, jpg sequence. dpx etc. is this intentional to have to use AME to render out?

thanks

Oli

Import and export

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Mylenium

Yes, it is intentional.

what’s new and changed in the next version of After Effects

Mylenium

S

SirDelano

Participant

What exactly is AME used when rendering out compressed files, I'm so confused as to how to compress files without H.264 and I cant find the AME anywhere either.

C

ckjedi

Participant

I'd like to chime in here too with a recent frustration.

My office has both CS6 and CC2017 installed on my machine for reasons I won't get into here. I do a lot of banner work that use MP4 video content. What irks me to no end is that I can export my comps (300x250, 23fps, 15 seconds, usually no audio) out of CS6 to its native h264 renderer and control the quality from a number of angles. In particular, a 0-100 slider for quality where I can dial in the file size, which is of extreme importance in the ad banner world. In a recent case, I was able to export to a 1.2mb file with a decent quality directly from AE CS 6, but if I export from CC2017 to AME, no amount of tweaking I try, including dialing the data rate to it's lowest possible target of .19mb, produces anything less than a 4.2mb file.

What REALLY REALLY frustrates me is that there is absolutely no trusting the Estimated File Size readout at the bottom of the screen, since at the above settings, it tells me the file should be 375k. If I choose to use CC2017, I have to first export out to a lossless file and then open it with a third party application, specifically Quicktime Pro (and on another machine for budgetary reasons) in order to get a good quality, low file size video for use in the banners.

I'd really appreciate an explanation for this.

Kevin J. Monahan Jr.

Community Manager

Hi ckjedi,

Sorry for this frustrating behavior. If you would not mind, please report all quality issues here. That way, they will be directed to the product team. They have the tech to actually correct these errors.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

C

ckjedi

Participant

I have reported the problem as requested. I still believe it belongs in this discussion however. At the very least it's a public declaration of what I'm experiencing and perhaps one others have experienced as well.

N

neverville

Participant

I'm calling BS on all these excuses from Adobe for removing h.264 encoding from AE.

My understanding is that the use of the h.264 encoder requires software publisher pay a royalty on every copy they sell. While Adobe has had the price of that royalty built into their own pricing model for years they've probably figured out that if they remove it from AE and other programs (Premiere, etc.) and force them all to go through one encoder than those royalties go strait on their profit margins.

Money is always the motive for this kind of corporate ignorance. I'm not impressed.

Kevin J. Monahan Jr.

Community Manager

Wonderful theory, neverville.

As I understand it, the decision had to do with avoiding duplicating development on both the Render Queue and AME, nothing to do with paying out royalties.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

Thermoval S.A.

Participant

ofc it is intentional this way you force more people to buy or pay for access to AME. before we could just use AE to handle it all and it was working perfectly fine, now Adobe is gutting the app to force it's users to pay more for more applications.

Tim Kurkoski

Adobe Employee

Adobe Media Encoder CC is included with After Effects CC. Regardless of whether you choose to subscribe to just After Effects or if you choose the all apps subscription, Adobe Media Encoder is available to you.

Alan_AEDScripts

Inspiring

Problems:

[I'm just about to move to CC from 5.5]

1.No clear history visible with dates etc and files rendered.

For example, seeing reduction in render times as you optimize a scene.

2.No easy CTRL +d to duplicate a render.

3.Having to use 2 apps to render different formats = more time

4.Any scripting shortcuts are null and void. I used to have an email mp4 auto add to a render

as a script. It also disrupts my workflow with background rendering with background renderer (Alvarez)

and scripting with Autodesk Backburner.

5.It's an annoyance as it forces me to use another app unecessarily. I

would have loved the buggy code until it was replaced on your roadmap.

6.All my templates have to be re-setup again to suit AME.

Thanks

Alan.

Dave_LaRonde

Inspiring

With that litany of perceived issues, I don't know if I'd move from 5.5 to CC if I were you. Unless you have no other choice, that is.

Szalam

Community Expert

I would recommend avoiding the QuickTime container for H.264. Just use the H.264 format in Adobe Media Encoder (it creates an MP4); it even has presets for YouTube.

C

Coste16

Participant

ok Thanks!

C

Coste16

Participant

Ok... so no h264 in AE anymore.. but I am a cloud user and I don't see Adobe Media Encoder available for download and install. Do I not have the option to get this program through creative cloud?

Szalam

Community Expert

It should be already on your system if you have Premiere and After Effects.

R

RottingAlien

Participant

As there was no direct answer and only people sending you to other links here it is:
just go to Edit -> Preferences -> output -> enable Show Deprecated Formats.

I hate to go trough AME too.. those who say after effects is not good to export h.264 are not worthy of even using AE in my opinion.. it always exported nice and faster than media encoder for me.

cheers

Szalam

Community Expert

RottingAlien wrote:
Those who say after effects is not good to export h.264 are not worthy of even using AE in my opinion.

Even though one of those people (Todd Kopriva) is an Adobe employee whose entire job is working on After Effects?

R

RottingAlien

Participant

yep, even him

MyleniumCorrect answer

Legend

Yes, it is intentional.

what’s new and changed in the next version of After Effects

Mylenium

Paul Slemmer

Participating Frequently

Nearly half of the times I render H.264 from AE, I am doing it with render settings other than Best. (eg. Half resolution, Motion Blur off) From what I was told, we will have to wait a few more releases for those settings to be controlled from AME. (Currently Source Settings only has control of Guide layers.)

What would you suggest to take the place of my workflow?

H

hami1car

Participating Frequently

Your comparison of the changes we've made to formats in the render queue to the changes we've made to video preview (ie., Mercury Transmit) is not useful. These changes had different circumstances driving our decisions. It's not relevant to your problems, but since the conversation has diverged slightly to include how the After Effects team makes decisions, I'll illuminate these two issues a bit:

Changing video preview to use Mercury Transmit was necessary because the API we were using on Mac OS was deprecated by Apple and also causing After Effects to crash in unrelated circumstances. Not doing this work would have resulted in a poor experience for all users on Mac OS regardless of whether or not they use video preview to an external monitor.
The main reason we removed H.264 and other formats from the render queue is because the code was buggy and not being maintained. Also contributing to is the fact that only some After Effects users encode to these formats. Adding to that, AME provides a solution to encode a comp to these formats. Those factors combined are what made us decide that our efforts would be better spent supporting the AME workflow, rather than to continue to maintain the formats in the render queue directly. We are aware that this means that users have to learn a new workflow, and also that there is some loss of functionality; AME is not a 1:1 replacement for the render queue.

Back to the main thread of the conversation...

I understand you're frustrated about the change to the AME workflow for H.264 because some of the functionality you found useful in the render queue is missing, or at least requires extra steps. I'll do my best to answer your questions 1-3, but as much as I know about the application I'm not the ultimate guru of AME. Other people on the forums may be able to give you better advice than me.

There is not a way that I'm aware of to make AME always default to the entire composition length. Adding such a control as an option is a good feature request for the AME team. You will need to either change that setting on your exports individually, or change the work area on your composition to the entire composition length (double-click on the work area bar) before you send the comp to AME.
The encoding time for each item in AME's queue is written in the encoding log. Choose File > View Log to access it. You can also click on the Status column hot text (Done, Stopped, etc.) for completed items. You can prevent AME from clearing old items in the queue by disabling the Remove completed items from queue on exit option in Preferences > General.
From your post on the AME forum, I assume you are using AME's watch folders by having After Effects write an intermediate file, which AME then processes to your selected preset. No, there is not a function to have AME automatically delete the source file. Again, such a control as an option is a good feature request for the AME team. I know they're aware of the shortcomings of AME's watch folder implementation, so feedback about how you think it should work will be appreciated.

To reiterate: please submit feature requests for AME, After Effects, or any Adobe application whenever the idea occurs to you. They do get read by human beings. On the After Effects team, Todd Kopriva reads our submissions and catalogues them, and we use the collective data from all users to help guide future development of After Effects. The AME team does the same.

I just bumped into a rendering error with vector art in AME, when rendering an comp. Who's responsibility is it to fix this? The AE team because it's an AE Comp or the AME team because the rendering is happening there?

I see you've moved my question about rendering the comp work area to the AME forum, so I'm guessing this is now their problem as well? (Ok, it's really my problem, because it's 11:15pm and now I have to redo three renders for a client tonight because of this.)

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