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AE will not import MPEG2: OS = Vista Business
I am trialling AE CS3 for a teaching institution which plans to have Vista Business version on all its student lab computers next year.
I find AE installs and runs OK but refuses to import any kind of MPEG-2 video including HDV. Error messages are like this:“After Effects error: File “xxxxxx.mpg” cannot be opened, it may be in an unsupported format.
(86 :: 1)”I know that Vista Business comes without MPEG-2 codec operating system support. I have tried installing “Cyberlink PowerDVD” which enables DVD-video playback but that has made no difference to this problem.
Could it be that AE does not include its own MPEG-2 support and is dependent on resources from the host operating system?
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3 Replies
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MPEG-2 support in After Effects is provided via the MainConcept encoder. Since Adobe licenses this technology on a per-copy basis, they do not include it with the trial version of the software. In fact, no licensed formats are available in the trial version including MP3. Most software vendors do this to cut down the cost of providing trial versions.
The simple truth is, even WITH the full release of AE you don’t want to be using MPEG-2 files. Performance in just about any app using MPEG-2 is absolutely horrible since they are long-GOP, interframe encoded files. You can do it, but don’t be surprised if performance is very poor.
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beenyweenies wrote:
“The simple truth is, even WITH the full release of AE you don’t want to be using MPEG-2 files. Performance in just about any app using MPEG-2 is absolutely horrible …”Our camera originals are often MPEG-2. With HDV that is becoming more and more the case. I can understand your argument for low-compression and even no-compression video for OUTPUT back to the video editor, but my understanding is that it is valid for the INPUT to be in the camera original format. No matter how good any other codec is, surely there is going to be a significant time and disk cost in converting from the original format?
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You can (and usually should) work with camera-native files to avoid quality loss, but the truth is MPEG-2 is so painfully slow, NOT because it is high quality but rather because of its processor-intensive format, you would be better off transcoding them to another format. This will help to avoid many other workflow problems as well, so speed is not the sole consideration here.
Most people consider MPEG-2/HDV to be an acquisition-only medium, and not a terribly great one either because it is the same datarate as mini-DV (3.1 megabytes per second, otherwise known as 25Mbps). The only way it is able to achieve HD frame sizes at a mini-DV datarate is by only using 2 actual frames for every 15 frames of video. The other 13 frames are just guessed by the codec and filled in with mush. It is all this “mush” that trips up your apps, since they don’t see actual frames.
The common workflow is to transcode the file to another type for post-production purposes. 8-bit uncompressed would probably result in no visible quality loss and would be relatively fast, but there aren’t a lot of good options available to you. You can’t really convert to another camera-native file type like DVCPRO HD without losing a lot of quality so it’s either uncompressed or accept some loss (perhaps with the motion_JPEG-A codec).Ultimately the biggest problem is shooting in MPEG-2 because it limits your post workflow so badly, so you may consider buying a camera that shoots in a more standard format such as the HVX200 and its DVCPRO HD files.
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