AAC Codec for AE CS3

[Jeff Blasczyk]

This is an HD video and Vimeo’s first response was to change from the H.264 video codec to MP4.

[Jeff Blasczyk]

Thanks for the response. I tried googling AAC as well and got tired of sifting threw all the garbage and had no luck. I’m on a p.c. currently. My main question I guess would be if that codec is a preset in after effects and if not how can I acquire it. I will try posting in the forum you mentioned. It is very fustrating completing projects on to be held up by the export process.

[Kevin Camp]

i wouldn’t worry about aac in ae if you need h.246 or mpeg-4. to get to those later video codecs you’ll want to use a compression utility that will do multipass encoding.

streamclip (free & multi-platform) will do mpeg-4 (it may do h.264 too). adobe media encoder should also do one, if not both of those, too. you’ll have to see if aac is an option for audio within the compression utility.

so your process should be render from ae at as high of quality as possible. then take that to a compression utility to get the size/data rate down for streaming.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jonathan Shohet]

Just for the record, MP4 is not a codec, it’s a container – like AVI and MOV – that is often used for H.264 video and AAC audio streams.

MPEGStreamclip does indeed provide AAC audio, as do lots of other free and commercial encoding apps. Other popular freeware encoders that can do MP4 with H.264 and AAC are “SUPER” and “MediaCoder”.

In fact, AE can also do this – if you choose the H.264 format in the Output Module you have the option for MP4 with H.264 with AAC using the Mainconcept codec. I can’t say how the quality compares to other encoders because I’ve never used it, but it seems it can’t do 2-pass encoding, which is usually used in high quality encodings.