Is there a way to get AE CS3 to import MP4s and WMVs

[Darby Edelen]

You shouldn’t use an MP4 or WMV in an AE project, even if you could. Transcode them to something else first that doesn’t have inter-frame compression. You want to avoid all flavors of MPEG including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264. Avoid WMVs and VC-1. And avoid pretty much every kind of encoding commonly used for web distribution. These all use forms of compression that build the information for the current frame from previous frames… This kind of compression means slow and often error prone renders from AE.

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA