• Adobe After Effects

  AE CS3 Rendering to H.264 format doesn’t work

  Posted by Shane White on December 19, 2008 at 10:04 pm

  In AE 7 I was able to render to H.264 format without any problems.

  Now with CS3 I keep getting error messages. I’m still rendering the 1280 x 720 format with square pixels at 30fps.
  Settings: No Audio
  Level: 3.1 (I’ve tried them all from 3.0 and up)
  Bitrate Settings: VBR, 1 Pass
  Multiplexer: .MP4
  Stream Compatability: Standard

  The Error Message I get is: After Effects: Out of Memory. (102400K Requested) (23::40)

  When I hit okay: After Effects: AEGP Plugin Media IO Plugin: UNRECOGNIZED EXCEPTION (5027::12)

  This happens with both my home system and my machine at work.
  At home I have AMD Athlon 64 Processor 2Ghz with 3GB of Ram and 52 gigs of free space. My system at work is even newer but alas the same result.

  I saw a thread about rendering out to full compression and doing the H.264 in another program but I have a lot of bits and pieces that I need to iterate on and my HD would fill up too fast.

  Any other ideas?

  Mark Whitney replied 17 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Michael Spencer

  January 5, 2009 at 6:51 pm

  I have the same issues running AE 8.0.2.27 under Windows xp pro. I cannot import h.264 files either. If you select QuickTime Movie as your Output type and select H.264 as your compression scheme, you can avoid the roadblock you describe. The file ends up with a .MOV extension but you can import it unless you change the extension to mp4. It’s not elegant and I’m not sure if the file sizes would be the same. AE 8.0.2 was supposed to have fixed this. Anybody have any ideas?
• 

  Mark Whitney

  January 20, 2009 at 11:50 pm

  Rats! I’m running into the same problem using H.264 and was hoping to find a solution here on the COW. It renders to the very end of the comp, then errors with the same messages as you listed.

  This is on a MacPro running XP Pro. I’ve only 2Gb of memory and have set AE CS3 Pro’s preferences to 90% Max mem use and 80% for max cache size.

  I’ve tried the H.264 output option with the Quicktime format as well. It completed, but file size was huge and it looked like crap.

  I also tried rendering using QT format and Sorenson 3 then using the Export to Web function within Quicktime Pro. It renders to completion and looks good, but the file size is still way too large for what I’m trying to accomplish.

  Oddly though, if I use the same original clip in Premiere Pro CS3 and render using the Adobe Media Encoder, which is also using the MainConcept codec but has a different interface and more options, it renders out as it should, although not as small as I’d really like.

  From the other reply to your post, it doesn’t sound as if an AE CS4 upgrade made any difference. I’m also puzzled as to why AE doesn’t have the Adobe Media Encoder option.

  What my goal is, is to end up with size & quality as the tutorials found on Lynda.com. I contacted them to see what they were using, and they’re simply outputting to H.264 MOV files from Final Cut Pro. I’m going to ask a couple friends that are using FCP and try to get more details about it’s encoder.

  Mark

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