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

[oliewdj]

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

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Yes, it is intentional.

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

Mylenium

[oliewdj]

Thanks Mylenium

glad its not a problem, ill use AME from now on.

Oli

[Paul Slemmer]

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?

[Todd_Kopriva]

Follow the link that Mylenium gave for details, including how to restore these formats to the render queue using a new preference setting.

[Paul Slemmer]

Ah, yes.  Thank you, I think I had seen that a long time ago and forgot.

I appreciate the consideration your team puts into their work, Todd.  Count me among the number looking for more source settings control from within AME.

[Mailo34]

well but render via AME i cant use the high speed multithread rendering as im used to in AAE, stop me someone if Im wrong, but I just tried that..

[Todd_Kopriva]

Correct, you can't use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing when rendering and exporting through AME.

But, even if you need that feature, you still shouldn't be exporting H.264 or MPEG-2 files directly out of After Effects.

You can render and export a losslessly compressed master file out of After Effects and have it go into a watch folder, from which AME will pick it up and create your final deliverables in H.264 and other formats.

[torgeirholm]

Workflows differ, and your suggested workflow doesn't work for us. We constantly generate H.264 files for client review throughout a project - directly from After Effects, with no desire whatsoever to create a master file for each iteration. Deliverables go via a lossless format of course, but that is usually only one or two out of sometimes as many as 50-60 renders on a project.The AME workflow was tried out, and promptly abandoned. Show Deprecated Formats is now enabled, and we're happy again!

[Rick Gerard]

I do the same thing, generate client review files all day long, but I am using the AME while I continue to work with AE. I can not afford to sit around for even 10 minutes while a file is rendering. When I'm working on a production in AE the only time I'm not actively working on a project is when I'm having lunch or I have to shift focus to another project. AE's render cue is now only rarely used.

The only exception is the rare occasion when I must use AE's ray traced rendering. The integration of C4D LTE has almost completely made this a non issue for me.

[PeterLanister]

Why Adobe has decided to put the codecs out of AE???

It´s kinda anoying to cue it on AME. I would like to do the rendering in AE and not have running another Program (AME)

The render wont get faster and the ram is melting down.

[Szalam]

PeterLanister wrote:

Why Adobe has decided to put the codecs out of AE???

It´s kinda anoying to cue it on AME. I would like to do the rendering in AE and not have running another Program (AME)

The render wont get faster and the ram is melting down.

First of all, you can render h.264 out of AE - instructions for how to bring those codecs back are in the link already given in this thread.

Also already given in this thread is the answer to your question. AE is NOT a good choice for making h.264. This has been mentioned several times. You would save yourself time and frustration if you were to read the thread before posting in it.

[hami1car]

Here's the reality. Adobe is removing the option to use those codecs in After Effects in the next update. So you can stop it with the "it's no big deal, just click the box" rubbish. It's ALWAYS been a big deal because when a company deprecates something, *It's going away*. They're just giving you warning first. And here comes the ax.

http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2014/04/new-changed-after-effects-cc-2014.html

And frankly, this condescending "you should be using AME anyway" attitude displayed by some people, especially some very regular posters here, is unhelpful and rude. The fact is, lots of people use the H.264 exporter for quick previews, where quality doesn't matter and speed does. These are paying customers that gain nothing but a headache from Adobe's moves here.

[Tim Kurkoski]

hami1car, you are correct that in the upcoming release of After Effects CC, the option to enable H.264 has been removed. To render a comp to H.264 you will need to use AME. Other formats, including MPEG2, FLV, and WMV, have also been removed in the same fashion.

Although we've removed them, we've never said that the H.264 and MPEG2 formats are not coming back to the After Effects render queue. In fact, we want to bring them back in a better form than they've existed in the past few versions of After Effects. This will likely happen as tighter integration with AME, although if we do it right you shouldn't notice the difference. This will be a significant amount of work and must fit in with other improvements we have planned for After Effects. It's not something you'll see soon, but it is on our roadmap.

It's worth reiterating here why we removed H.264 and these other formats from the After Effects render queue. The code we were using for these formats was old and buggy, and was not maintainable. Modernizing this code would be a significant amount of work. The After Effects team instead chose to use AME as the path for these formats. AME has an entire team of software developers dedicated to encoding workflows, while we on the After Effects team focus on core motion graphics, compositing, and VFX workflows.

hami1car, I see that you've been posting on the AME forum and asking questions about the After Effects workflow. Please also submit feature requests to the AME team where you see need for improvement.

[hami1car]

Thanks for your reply Tim. I understand that your team faces some significant engineering hurdles to update your encoding code, but I'm at a loss to understand why you'd pull something out that people use on a VERY regular basis. Just the number of people asking where the codecs went in this forum should be a huge red flag. Fixing that seems like an obvious no-brainer when it comes to resource allocation. Is something like Mercury Transmit really going to affect more people than being able to directly export files to the most popular video codec in the world?

With the render queue, I can pick a render preset, and output preset, hit render and walk away with the confidence that I'll get the results I expect. However, since that option has been taken away. I'm trying to understand the workflow. I've posted these questions, but so far I haven't gotten any solutions. I presume you're an expert, so I'll pose them to you:

1. The first render I tried went wrong because it only rendered the work area in AME, and I can't find any way to make it default to the full comp. So now I get to change that setting individually every time, or manually scrub through every comp and make sure the work area is set to the full comp. Every time. I can guarantee this is going to get missed and I'm going to hosed by it.  Is there something I'm missing?
2. AME doesn't show how long individual renders take, and clears it every time you close the app, so there's no way to see how long the individual renders are taking without a stopwatch. I'm guessing users are just out of luck on this.
3. AME's watch folders (already a clunky solution) fill up my drive with huge intermediate files I don't need, and apparently I have to manually go back and clean that up. Is there a setting for this?

[Tim Kurkoski]

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

[hami1car]

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.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

I did not move any of your posts. Another forum moderator may have done so, thinking that it may have fit that forum better and thus would garner an answer faster.

Questions about encoding After Effects comps in AME can go in either forum. The issue of where to post comes down to which forum you think you'll get a better answer from.

I recommend you start a new thread in this forum with the rendering error you're getting. Please provide details. Screenshots are helpful.

[hami1car]

Well, you're off the hook on this one. I had a comp that had awful aliasing on some bright magenta vector art in the final H.264 output from AME. I thought it was AME (the preview in AME implied it would encode crystal clear), but then I got the same result rendering in AE.

After further testing, the files were ok. Apparently it was an issue displaying them with Quicktime Player for Windows. They appeared much better when viewed in AE. Bizarre.

Thanks for your response.

[hami1car]

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Since this thread was resurrected today, it reminded me of this conversation. I opened feature requests for AME for the specific issues above in July-August 2014, as you said I should do. As of yet, none of them have been implemented. I also made a private forum post to the AME team listing all the issues with rendering AE projects in AME. It was backed up by a number of other users in the forum. Crickets from the AME team, and as far as I can tell, nothing has changed.

Is 1.5 years too short a timeframe to expect movement on this? Will an attempt be made to make this experience better in AME? Or, is H.264 coming back to After Effects?

Also, you say people are reading these, but I have an AE bug report from 2014 that still says "Unverified". Does what does that mean?

All of this certainly feels like our concerns and feedback are being ignored.

[ljuboj11496101]

This is a joke right? We have 2017 (ver. 14.1) and not only h.264 is still gone and nothing actual useful available any more, also your option where one can enable it in AE cc is now gone!?! Now go figure that! Another think, spending 4k on 22 core cpu and then have it utilized at 34% only, you know what keep your CC see you in 2020 again but, somehow I doubt there will be something improved by then! Till option of 100% CPU utilization and rendering to other than gif´s and jpeg´s, I am sticking to my cs6! And yes I noticed there is also cc media encoder, and  it is taking 1.5h for the h.264 output of the file needing 14min in same format on AE cs6! So yea, have a nice improved day, all that new and shiny effects and functions are useless, if one can´t properly render it´s work!!

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi LjuboJ,

Sorry for the frustration here. As I understand it, H.264 export will be available via AME only now and in the future. In other words, it likely will not return to the Render Queue. The encoder was of lower quality and was taxing on the team to maintain the feature, so it didn't make sense for us to continue developing it. Sorry.

If you wish to address specific quality or performance issues you mention, please file a bug report. It would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

[ljuboj11496101]

In the time of the rise of the "small clips" (youtube, snapchat, FB etc) you terminate h.264 option...yes that makes sense, what also makes sense right now to me, is to go and short your stock, because you will definitely eventually go broke within blindness like that! One can describe your decisions (all of them!) like this: you are going blind, slowly but surely loosing touch with the reality, probably sticking to couple of TV experts, their own opinion, forgetting what makes Adobe Adobe on the first place. And so, slowly but surely leaving your own market to competition (like MS), till nothing else will be left but couple of your TV media experts and shiny new, but at the end completely useless programs! And maybe just maybe someone will get the bigger picture by then, if at all! I am already looking for alternatives...

[Szalam]

For what it's worth, the interface between After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder has improved recently.

One big benefit of this process is that you can finish a project, send it to AME, and then move on to the next video while your first one renders. You don't have to stop your work to wait for a render to happen. Some people really like that feature.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi LjuboJ,

In the time of the rise of the "small clips" (youtube, snapchat, FB etc) you terminate h.264 option...

This was removed around 3 years ago. Sorry about that. If you wish to complain about the removal of features, please file your complaint with the product team here.

I am already looking for alternatives...

Sorry you are so disappointed in the removal of this feature. Please file any grievances you have with the product team in the aforementioned link.

Regards,
Kevin