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Exporting through Media Encoder vs After Effects
Hello,
I’ve created a relatively simple animated showreel in After Effects that is mainly text based with a few images.
The project is 1920×1080, and I rendered it out at this size in H.264, with audio (AAC, 44.1KHz, 320Kbps), from After Effects. The final file size was about 90MB and it took about 20 minutes and looked great.
Later, I wanted to render out a final copy. I’ve read Dave LaRonde’s “stock answer #3” in which he advises to use Media Encoder for rendering out AE projects.
I set up the project to render out through Media Encoder at 1280×720 (in an attempt to speed things up – please correct me if there is anything I should know about rendering the file out at 720 when it has been created at 1080), H.264, with VBR 2-pass and 2MBPS and audio at AAC, 44.1Khz, 320Kbps. The final file size was about 28MB.
It took about 1.5 hours and looked terrible in comparison to the file that AE produced.
What is it that AE did that got such good results in such little time?
Export settings are still something that I’m struggling to get my head around..!
Thanks in advance.
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2 Replies
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I would think the first thing would be the data rate for your 720 p file. It is low: 2 Mbps. I would increase that and see if that helps. Media Encoder will take awhile because you’re downconverting.
Why don’t you just go through After Effects to make your 720p H.264 instead of Media Encoder if you had better results that way with you 1080p/i file?
Jessica Muth
Production Operations Manager
Video Labs
Rockville, MD
301-217-0000
jmuth@videolabs.net -
Thanks for the reply. Normally I set the data rate to 5MB/s, but in this instance I saw how long it was going to take to export so I thought I’d try speeding it up a bit.
I used Media Encoder instead of After Effects because I was under the impression that was the best way to export things. I thought it would be quicker, but actually it took much much longer, even with reduced settings.
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