Mac vs. PC for After Effects

[Tony Kloiber]

Does AE have the ability to fine tune your mpeg compression? I would think that most people would like the control of a program meant for mpeg compression. Render the file in whatever format you working with and drop it into a compression program.

TonyTony

[George Loch]

Actually, I have found the compression options to be better quality outside of AE anyway so, I am not sure why you would want to go directly from AE to Mpeg2 when you will get better quality from a dedicated encoder.

“right tool…” idea.

-gl

[Mylenium]

[Dave LaRonde] “I don’t know the reason why, but there is a reason.”

The underlying MainConcept MPEG routines were initially PC only.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mylenium]

[TonyTony] “Does AE have the ability to fine tune your mpeg compression? I would think that most people would like the control of a program meant for mpeg compression.”

It has, people just never seem to know how to use it.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mylenium]

[George Loch] “Actually, I have found the compression options to be better quality outside of AE anyway so, I am not sure why you would want to go directly from AE to Mpeg2 when you will get better quality from a dedicated encoder.”

I would argue that. The Adobe MPEG-II encoder produces excellent output, you just need to tweak the settings. Sure, there are even better tools out there, but considering you get your MPEG-II output “for free” with any Adobe video app, you can’t complain. Compared to what you get bundled with tools from Avid/ Pinnacle and others it’s still way superior.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Jimmy Brunger]

TMPGEnc is very good: https://www.tmpgenc.net

There is a free version and also a bunch of other purchase versions. TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 is only $37 and should be all you need.

Ah..it is only PC though..

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Sando Calrissian]

For our macs we have a program called Flip4mac which allows us to export .wmv’s from final cut (clients on PC’s sometimes ask for this format) Once installed it also sits under your export option in After Effects.

I have only really used it for approval versions where immense quality isn’t really that important. But it does work… You may be able to get a trial version – i havn’t checked.

[Tony Kloiber]

If you can get mpeg 2 output that suits your needs from a AE render then your saved a step and some time but, most of the time I need a file that I can use in an edit and then that program gets mpeg compressed, so rendering to mpeg 2 from AE only comes up as a need (for me) if I were doing DVD menus.

When rendering DVD menus your usually taking about a 20~30 second clip and so the time to compress this in another step with another program is negligible.

TonyTony

[David Bogie]

> My problem is that the majority of the files I need to render need to be an .mpg or .m2v,< Why are you providing those formats? Those are generally highly compressed and lossy release formats. They are usually encoded at the final steps in a production pipeline. I'd ask the next person in line why they think they want mpeg, in any form, from After Effects. bogiesan This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”