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How to reduce huge H.264’s?
Hey guys, I have a question for you;
I have to reformat 20 .mov videos that are about 1 hour long and 1.5 Gb in size each. My client wants me to reformat them into h.264 mov files at 720×480 or even 360×420 (At this point, we are desperate). The problem is that when I try to render the files (which as you might guess, takes for ever), they come up in ridiculous sizes.
I played around with the settings, I reduced the quality to 50% in the output options, the size to 360×240, and limited the bitrate at 50kbps, but it seems to ignore this and still go and make huge huge files. Does anyone know what settings or other software I could use to create smaller h.264’s?
And, in addition, I also need to make them into avi’s, which are turning out huge as well. I don’t really know much about AVI, so, what codec do you guys recommend I use to render the videos in order to keep the sizes manageable?
I forgot to mention, I’m shooting for about 350-450Mb per file.
Thank you so, so much for your help, I’m about to pull my hair out!!
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7 Replies
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If you’re trying to use AE to render out final H264 compression, don’t. AE is not really meant for that- Adobe Media Encoder would be what you need.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania
http://www.ennstudio.ro -
I agree with Ted.
As Dave LaRonde says:Dave’s Stock Answer #3:
Don’t use AE to compress files for final delivery. The various compressors are there only to make quick ‘n dirty files showing a project’s progress to producers, clients, the kids, etc. AE is incapable of doing multipass encoding, a crucial feature that greatly improves the image quality of H.264 and MPEG-type files in particular.
Render a high-quality file from AE, and use a different application to do the compression. Popular ones are Adobe Media Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze and Apple’s Compressor, which comes bundled with Final Cut Suite. Even compressing in Quicktime Pro is better than compressing in AE.
Making good-looking compressed files is almost as much an art as it is a science. It is NOT straightforward at all. I recommend asking a few questions at the COW’s Compression Techniques forum.
AE can do H.264 encoding and it does it reasonably well. However, it’s not so great for doing batch renders and, while 2-pass encoding takes longer to encode you do get better quality for the resulting file size.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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heh, I see Dave has also chimed in with a shorter version. Darn my having to do work in the middle of a post.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I find that when I render h264 to .mp4 files instead of .mov I get much smaller files. Don’t know if that’s an option for you though.
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Hey guys, thank you so much for help, I managed to get the files to the size I wanted by exporting them as .MP4’s
Again, thank you so much!
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That is what I did, I rendered big mov’s from AE and converted them into small .mp4’s with Media Encoder.
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You can actually add an AE comp directly to the Media Encoder to bypass the big lossless render. You open the Media Encoder and go to File and then Add After Effects comp.
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