The Hive’s AE Quicktips #1

Hey everybody… have you ever gotten failed renders and error messages when you try to render out your high definition H.264 video in After Effects?  I do all the time, and it is in part because the H.264 Output Module is not designed to render HD video.  There is a separate workaround, that I get asked to explain all the time on forums.  This is a great technique to know when you have to submit proofs to a client many times within a day, and maybe are uploading via FTP, have to burn to disc, or otherwise have limited space.  You obviously can’t give them full resolution Quicktime Animation mov’s… that would be preposterous!  Instead of outputting gigabytes of information and running them through a compression program, you can output to H.264 no problem with my handy little workaround.  This tutorial uses After Effects CS4 and runs on Windows Vista.

YouTube Preview Image


5

Comments

Topher Welsh

Topher Welsh is a post production artist working mainly in the fields of motion graphics and visual effects. He is a freelancer out of Tacoma, Washington, and also runs www.VisualFXtuts.com, which provides a daily fix of tutorials from any and all applications in the visual effects industry. His personal website is found here: www.Toe-Fur.com.


  • Aharon Rabinowitz says:
    June 26, 2009 at 7:38 am

    Nice job – a tutorial that will help a lot of people who need to go to H.264. Of course, I’ll always recommend you render out uncompressed and then compress in Apple Compressor or Sorenson Squeeze. But a lot of people don’t have that option or the drive space.

    Keep up the good work, man! Hope to see more from you soon.

  • Doru says:
    June 26, 2009 at 11:50 am

    yeap, thank you for the tip, I already know that :) , unfortunetlly I learned the hard way: I got that error message when I tried to export to h264. Then I installed quicktime and it worked. Problem is you have to own quicktime so its like paying twice for the same h264 codec :( . Now I still don’t know why i can’t export directly to h264. Now ok quicktime its usefull for other things to so do not kill me.

  • Kris says:
    June 26, 2009 at 10:24 pm

    Just thinking, you might also use the quicktime module from File|Export…. there’s more settings available there than in the render queue (audio compression, hinting etc.)

  • many-2 says:
    August 12, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    In fact, the H264 output module (without quicktime) works very well at all resolutions, not just SD like PAL and NTSC. For it to work, you’ve got to set the proper flags, much like with mpeg2.

    settings to change to export a fullHD (1920×1080) movie in H264

    pixel aspect ratio : set to square pixels

    profile : set to “High Profile” (which is the typical profile for blu-ray)

    level : set to 4 or higher

    IMPORTANT NOTE : When you set the “Level” parameter watch for the frame rate parameter as it usually gets reset to a value of 59.94 if, for example, you set Level to a value of 4. You can change it back to 29.97 (or anything else you might need). Failure to do so will bring an error message.

  • many-2 says:
    August 12, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    also, if you want more information about the required “Levels” and “Profiles” for proper H264 encoding, you can refer to the H264 article on wikipedia.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H264