[Paul Roper]

Hi Dan,

That looked like exactly what I needed…so (after making a copy of the prefs file!) I went in and changed the “10” to “30” and then launched AE, but it didn’t like it – it gave an error message, and automatically duplicated the prefs file and appended “.old” on the filename:

By the way, the error is nothing to do with that double closing quote mark (…”30″”) – that’s just a part of the error message.

Setting AE to watch folder mode revealed that it was back to its old 10-second routine. BUT, the server here has been updated so it’s no longer a problem anyway! The issue was if I was rendering a long sequence of frames, all the AE render nodes would ask (after each frame rendered) which frames had been rendered, and it was taking the server a while to produce a list of the hundreds/thousands of frames that had been rendered. But that’s been fixed now.

But it still seems very odd that editing a prefs file would cause AE to freak out – surely the point of a prefs file is to tell AE how to behave?!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

The “cumbersome process” you describe is the correct one – After Effects is really not designed for outputting compressed formats; in fact a huge amount of this and other forums’ bandwidth could be saved if Adobe removed these formats altogether!

The normal workflow is to output form After Effects, import into an editing program such as Final Cut Pro, Avid or Premiere, edit it into your program, then export the compressed format. Or, as you have found, export an uncompressed format from After Effects then use a specialised compressor to encode it.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Have you tried applying one of AME’s presets without altering it? If that gives you stuttery output, it could maybe be a problem with the speed of your system – drives or processor. H264 is a processor intensive codec (as far as I know) ie. it takes a lot of computing power to decompress each frame, which is why codecs as good as H264 are a relatively new invention.

If one of the preset setups give you OK output, start changing the settings one parameter at a time, then do a test compress, see if it’s OK, change the next parameter…until you get stuttery results. Then you can isolate the problem to one particular setting.

You might get more help on one of the Adobe forums (such as https://forums.adobe.com/community/ame ) – this is going off-topic for an After Effects forum.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thank you for this! I haven’t tried it yet but it seems like a great workaround which I hadn’t thought of – I assume the idea is to simulate a click on the ‘pause’ button. I also have Keyboard Maestro installed which could do the same thing, hopefully slightly more reliably – it has a “click at x,y on the frontmost window” so in theory it shouldn’t matter where on the screen the watch folder progress window is.

Presumably I need to take care that once a render has started, nothing important appears in the location where the watch folder progress window was, because the repeated clicking will still continue.

[Paul Roper]

Rather than exporting via Media Encoder, render it in After Effects using one of the “editing” codecs (eg. Animation, ProRes), then check this rendered, uncompressed movie. If it’s stuttery, then there’s a problem with AE. If it’s not, THEN compress this movie in AME. If the compressed result is stuttery, it’s a problem with your compression settings in AME.

I assume your original comp is set to 25fps in After Effects? If not, then you’re asking for trouble trying to render/compress it in one pass at a different frame rate.

Hope that helps.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Yep – The Color Stabilizer effect is for this exact thing (under Effect > Color Correction > Color Stabilizer). You just need to choose a white point and a black point and off you go. More info here:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a9d3c597-7bc9a.html

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks!! I just tried that – I exported the clip from Premiere, then imported it into AE, and hey presto! There are all the markers! But, is there a way to just “attach” the metadata to the original clip? Having to re-export the clip isn’t a very efficient process.

[Paul Roper]

If you just want to get a few options into a drop-down menu, you can kinda do a workaround like this:

Say you want to be able to have a menu populated with the words:
hello world
goodbye
another option
57

Create four nulls and rename them hello world, goodbye, another option, 57.
On a layer of your choice, add an Expression Controls > Layer Control. This becomes your pop-up menu, where you can select “hello world, goodbye, another option, 57”.
When you need to access that menu choice in an expression, use:

effect(“Layer Control”)(“Layer”).name

For example, if you’ve chosen layer “57”, the expression:

effect(“Layer Control”)(“Layer”).name*2

will give you 114.

Don’t know if this helps your workflow, but it was interesting (for me, anyway!) to see that this theory actually worked.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It’s a Final Cut thing. For some reason it always wants to interpret ProRes footage as upper field first. Don’t worry – all you have to do is right-click on the word ‘upper’ (under the ‘Field Dominance’ column) in the browser BEFORE you edit it into your timeline and change it to ‘none’. Your footage is NOT fieldy from After Effects.

If you’ve already placed it into the timeline, FCP is too dumb to make this change automatically follow through to the timeline, so you’ll have to change it in the timeline, by selecting the clips(s) in the timeline, pressing command-9, then right-click-changing it to ‘none’.

Maybe there’s some kind of ‘default interpretations’ prefs file somewhere (like After Effects has) that you can edit to change this behaviour. If there is, maybe someone can point us to where it lives.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I can’t remember where I read it (it was a reasonably reliable source) but I as I recall, the only difference between compressor 3 and 4 is the ability to send straight from FCP X. Not really a feature worthy of a “whole number” upgrade! The processing is still the same antiquated 32-bit stuff we’ve come to expect from Apple, and you still have to do that silly Qmaster workaround if you want this vintage software to actually realise your computer has multiple processors and is not, in fact, a Quadra 950.

Personally, I find Adobe Media Encoder way faster and more reliable than Compressor. Or have you considered the more advanced (but more expensive) encoders such as Episode?