AE squishes 1080×1920 video into top half and replaces bottom with green

[Claire Presnall]

It seems to be mostly an issue with ProRes 422HQ, because I just exported some lovely 4444s that are nice and proper right out of AE.

Also, the file size is 1080×1920, so it’s exporting the right number of pixels, just in all the wrong places.

Computer set up:

Mac Pro (2019)

3.3 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon W

256 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

Monterey 12.3.1

AE 22.4.0 (Build 56)

[Claire Presnall]

Update! (no there isn’t a solution, just more info on the issue and pictures!)

I think this is an AE 22.4 issue. I don’t remember having this problem in previous versions, and the computer that has been using AE 2021 hasn’t been having this issue (until today when I used AE22.4 on it). I JUST updated to 22.5, so we’ll see if that fixes it.

My latest project had 1080×1080, 1080×1350, and 1080×1920 vertical versions of videos. I filled my render queue with 422 (HQ) outputs with the 9x16s at the top of the queue. The 9x16s looked great, but the 4x5s and 1x1s came out black. They were all the right file size, but the 1x1s and 4x5s were black video with just a spinning grey wheel of nope. Not the rainbow wheel of doom at least.
Tried the ol’ 4444 trick, no go.
Restarted the program, resent everything back to the render queue, but this time I put the 1x1s at the top of the queue.
The 1x1s looked great, and 4x5s and 9x16s came out squished up into the top (1×1 section) of the frame and the bottom was full of that lovely “something has gone wrong” green.
Again, 4444 trick failed.
So I tried restarting the program and only exporting the 9x16s . That worked great.
Then I restarted and exported the 4x5s. Great again!

So that leads me to believe we’re getting hung up on the size of whatever gets output first.
My first go around, I had the 9x16s at the top, so when there wasn’t enough pixel info to make a 9×16 in the 1x1s and 4x5s, they just gave up. When I tried again with the 1x1s at the top, they tried to make everyone else fit the image info into a 1×1 and filled the rest with green.
I should test again with the 4x5s at the top, but I haven’t had a chance to try that yet. I’ll give it a go after I’ve hit today’s deadlines and report back.

One last hitch, though. I also do a lot of ribbon boards which are super weird and random sizes, but they’re all horizontal. I never have this issue outputting a variety of different ribbon boards from the same queue. It doesn’t matter if some are 24000×48, some are 18000×48 and some are 1500×72, they output just fine back to back to back and even output a vertical in the queue if need be. So this seems to be an issue mostly on these vertical videos that all have the same pixel width (1080).

Some workarounds I found were to
1 Restart and cross my fingers. (this usually doesn’t work on my machine. Once it decides your 9×16 is half green, there’s no getting a 9×16 422 (HQ) out of that project. But thankfully for the machine I was using today, this did the trick)
2 Switch my 9:16 output from 422 (HQ) to 4444. (this usually works on my machine, but didn’t work on the machine I was using today)
3 Dynamically link the comp to a Premiere sequence, and export there. (guaranteed to work every time. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it)

I can’t send to Media Encoder on my machine as it has refused to see anything out of AE for the last several years no matter the version (yes they always match). I didn’t try on the computer I was using today. That includes outputting live Dynamic Comps through Premiere which output as missing. Trying to send it to ME from AE has finally upgraded from “never arrives” to sometimes arrives but always fails the export, so my Premiere workaround above has to be exported one comp at a time.

Today’s Mac with the issue:
Mac Pro (2019)

3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W

192 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

Monterey 12.4 (21F79)

AE 22.4.0 – Build 56