• Adobe After Effects

  Videos rendered by After Effects CS4 are slow to play in quicktime

  Posted by Jacob Saltzman on December 31, 2009 at 9:02 pm

  Whenever I try to play a video I rendered in After Effects, it will not play correctly in Quicktime. I know that all the footage is there; I can (slowly) scroll through each frame, but when played at full speed it stops and skips. I render all my compositions in full resolution and as .MOV files because I use Avid and that is all it will accept.

  I have had this issue on two computers with both Windows and Mac:

  iMac 4,1 (2006)
  Mac OS X 10.6
  2g RAM
  250g hard drive
  1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
  Quicktime 7 (default)
  Quicktime X

  and

  HP Workstation xw8600
  Windows XP Professional SP2
  500g hard drive + 1 tb
  4g RAM
  Intel Core 2 Duo (not sure of speed)
  Quicktime 7

  both are running After Effects CS4 9.0.2

  Note: Quicktime X behaves worse than Quicktime 7, but both are still pretty bad

  Jacob Saltzman replied 16 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Michael Szalapski

  December 31, 2009 at 9:21 pm

  You will have this issue on any computer you try it on most likely. The file you’re outputting from AE is (probalby) a lossless, high quality file. Which is fine for bringing into Premiere or Final Cut.
  Why? You ask.
  Because the data rate is too high. It’s nothing to do with your processor or RAM in this case it’s hard drive speed. Unless your running a good RAID setup you will not be able to play that file back.

  Use Adobe Media Encoder (or some other encoding software or video editing program, but NOT After Effects) and encode the file as something more playable such as a WMV or a Quicktime with the MP4 or .H264 codec.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
• 

  Steve Roberts

  December 31, 2009 at 10:24 pm

  You should render full res, high quality, but to the Avid codec, yes?

  You might be able to find those on the Automatic Duck website.
• 

  Jacob Saltzman

  January 2, 2010 at 1:03 am

  Thanks! The video is playable. Why would Adobe (or anyone) create an exporter that exports that , generally, doesn’t work? Are they meant to be converted again? When I load the choppy clips into Avid, it converted them somehow into playable footage, but the resolution was horrible. I guess you have to pay 10,000 dollars to make it look professional. Maybe I should switch to Final Cut.

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