[Walter Soyka]

[Nitai Lev-Oren] “how much faster is the export with the plugin? they say 25% faster is true?”

I haven’t benchmarked it, but there is a lot of extra overhead using Dynamic Link between Ae and AME to encode H.264.

There is a demo available if you’d like to try on your own.

[Nitai Lev-Oren] “what is ffmpeg?”

ffmpeg is “a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video” that is open-source. AfterCodecs builds on ffmpeg to bring a lot of its power and flexibility to Ae, Pr, and AME.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Unfortunately, I think Motion has some catching up to do before it’s a viable competitor to After Effects for serious motion graphics. While the philosophy of Motion is brilliant, it is missing significant pieces of the toolset — specifically, a project manager and extensibility — necessary for large-scale mograph projects.

I think that Mainframe’s Cavalry [link] will come to occupy the 2D mograph niche Alex sees for Motion pretty quickly.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

There’s nothing wrong with using supported MXF footage directly in Ae, but what kind of MXF files are you dealing with? What strikes you as cumbersome about them?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Beyond direct H.264 export, AfterCodecs also supports ProRes (via ffmpeg) on Mac/PC, H.265, and Hap. (Note that the latest release of After Effects, v16.0.1, also supports native, official Apple ProRes encoding on Windows.)

If you don’t need those things, you don’t need AfterCodecs. If you do need those, AfterCodecs is great! Personally, I find the quality with its ffmpeg-based H.264 encoder is a bit higher than the MainConcept H.264 encoder that Adobe Media Encoder relies on.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Bentley] “Is it a mac/pc thing? On PC I got QT access back when I changed to 2019. Last poster didn’t indicate which platform.”

Ae CC 2018 supported Animation-codec QuickTime, too. I’m on PCs and we have used Animation extensively throughout the changeover.

As I noted above, some output modules that were based on Apple QuickTime had to be redone to use Adobe MediaCore QuickTime encoders instead, but I promise, the support for a set of formats has been there the entire time.

See here for more:
https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/quicktime7-support-dropped.html

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

I have an animation-codec QuickTime imported in Ae CC 2019 v16.0.1 right now.

Do you get a specific error message?

Have you tried resetting preferences?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

QuickTime Animation codec has always been supported. When Adobe dropped support for export via Apple QuickTime, they added their own first-party support for several popular QuickTime codecs, including Animation, in the very same version.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

This is all dependent on your comp size, bit depth, frame rate, available memory, and preview settings.

There are a few preview settings you can change to get a longer preview. See here for more:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1135155#1135213

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Can you describe the transitions you want to use?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Jan Vork] “For me, it feels like a good old Apple vs Adobe feud. Apple drops Flash, Adobe drops Quicktime.”

These are both old technologies, and today, it’s also true to say that Apple has dropped QuickTime, and Adobe has dropped Flash.

[Jan Vork] “Both were nice formats. For Quicktime Animation/Lossless is no good alternative. It’s quite harsh to have an archive of Quicktime Animation encoded files, which can no longer be imported in After Effects…”

To be perfectly clear, Ae can still read and write Animation-codec MOV files via Adobe’s direct support (though I do not believe that interframe compression is supported). Anything that you rendered in previous versions with the Lossless preset will still import on current releases.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]