Rendered video different resolution to composition

[MMisterMM]

Hi

I am using quite an old version of after Effects CS6... I know it's acient.

Everything has been working great, but today I am having a weird issue.

I have a comp for mobile with resolution measuring 1440×2560. As far as I can see, I have done nothing different to what I normally do, but when I render, the resulting video is 1440x2304  😕

I can't see anything that would do this. I overlayed the rendered video ontop of my comp to see what was missing, which is 128 pixels from both the top and bottom.

What am I missing here?

Many thanks

Mr M

[RobShultz]

Maybe try resetting preferences:

To restore the default preference settings, press and hold the following keys while the application is starting.

1. Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows)
2. Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS)

[MMisterMM]

Thnaks for the sugegstion Rob

On PC, just tried that and the issue continues. Since doing that, something odd is happening to the nouse now  😕

[MMisterMM]

That was meant ot be sound, not nouse.

[MMisterMM]

Restored default setting again on statup as per Robs suggestion,

Then tried resetting composition presets to default (which removes all the custom preset I set up). I then created a new compostion with the custom dimensions 1440×2560 which AE recognised as 9:16 and put a few random elements in the scene. Then rendered and again, the resulting render was 1440x2304 again.

I am guessing this is a bug that I'm stuck with, as it's such old software.

[MMisterMM]

Just messed about with a few more custom comp dimensions. Looks like the maximum height of a comp is 2304 pixels. Set it to anything higher than that, such as 2305 and the redered output will be cropped back to a height of 2304. I also noticed if I set the dimensions to a height of 2304, it renders nice and fast. If I add 1 pixel top the height, it slows waaay down.

If anyone has AE CS6, are you able to duplicate this problem? If you can, I will stop trying to fix it.

If this is a bug, I won't be paying £20 a month to fix it 🙂

Many thanks.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

It's not uncommon for CODECs to require strict adherence to a 2x2 block for the width and height of the output video. IOW, the dimension should be divisible by 2 on either wise. And some CODECs (ProRes) work within very specific output dimensions while others require specific settings to be enabled in order to output at higher dimensions (MP4). 

You will do well by sharing the output and render settings and of course your comp settings.

HTH

[MMisterMM]

Thnaks Roland. It's definitely a limitation of the H.264 codec AE SC6 uses that is causing this.

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

This is perfectly normal. Those limits were only raised long after CS6 was released. Back then exporting such large files to H.264 wasn't even a thing. You have to live with it and export other formats from CS6, then encode them in external tools like Handbrake.

Mylenium

[MMisterMM]

Thanks Mylenium. I did try a different codec before heading back here. Yup, it was exactly as you said, I can render as AVI with the correct resolution, only there isn't an AVI compression option that would accept the resolution, so I would have to render uncompressed, which would make the file way too big for my drive.

I also had a dig around to see if there was any way to use an more up to date H.264 codec within AE CS6, but came up short.

I think I'll just have to reduce the resolution for now. Thnaks again for the replies.