[Help] Adobe After Effects Exporting

[menzerin]

Thank you everyone for your help/suggestions! But unfortunately I don't have enough space to export every scene in lossless format that's why I wanted to get some kind of solution.

[zoidberg]

x264 in theory can let you choose frame types for certain frames using qpfile, but that's 10th level stuff. Plus I'm not sure if it works. The idea being you can pick the exact frame for a scene change (when creating chapter entries)

[X5gb]

I just finished putting my MIGP project into Premiere using h264 in a .mp4 container, re-doing all the edits I did with videoredo, and then adding the masks to remove the duplicate German subs, car scene flip screen (thanks to PDB for spotting that in his cancelled original hdtv version project) and expanding frame to both credits and burg window (which I decided to try and replicate the cinema version and have the expand as he walks towards the window increasing the effect (as the beginning of the scene in the WEB-DL is not Open Matte but only cropped on the sides from 2:35:1 why they didn't just use the full IMAX framing cropped to 16:9 is beyond me) by using a mixture of reverse crop (zoom) and normal crop (via nesting) going from the 2:35:1 of the Bluray at the beginning to the Open Matte (still cropped at that point) as the camera stops moving forward and begins panning up).

I then came across this thread about h264 when it is imported into Adobe AE and Premiere, that it sucks at uncompressing and that you should change assets to lossless (eg avi lagarith) or Pro Res prior to editing. Obviously, I don't want to have to start over so was wondering how much of a hit the video quality will take if I leave the editing using h264 and then exporting in avi lagarith and encoding using x264 in megui.

Also, what is the best software to convert h264 to lagarith for future reference.

Any advice much appreciated,

[deleted user]

I never heard anything about Premiere sucking at decoding h264 - it does suck at ENcoding it though - Adobe's h264 encoder implementation is absolutely horribly bad so you wanna export in some lossless form and then do your final encode in x264

My Shaun of the Dead project was also done using the Blu Ray h264 muxed into mp4 (as premiere can't read mkv) and then exported losslessly - no issues whatsoever with that

Of course what you never wanna do is REencode the Blu Ray before importing it into Premiere (unless youre using something lossless)

On the contrary - transcoding the Blu Ray h264 stream even to a high bitrate DNxHD or ProRes will introduce mild loss of quality - so better just use the original h264 stream! Premiere in my experience has been very efficient working with h264 streams as long as they aren't using too extreme encoding settings (which Blu Rays usually dont) - then it can start getting laggy (we're talking about stuff like 4K though - I never had issues with 1080p) - but even that would only be an issue for editing not for exporting

When exporting check the "Maximum Bit Depth" and "Maximum Render Quality" boxes in the export dialogue (don't remember the exact names but it's something like that)

[X5gb]

Thanks again for the quick reply TomArrow.

Both PDB (mentions it sucks) and spoRv talk about it on the second page of this thread and I've also read about it on other forums. Supposedly when AE and Premiere decompress the h264 to edit, it doesn't do it very well and as SpoRv mentions on previous page it's best to do the following:

source (lossy)-> editing (uncompressed) -> lossless (for further editing, if needed) -> final encoding (lossy)

Hoping your right as I don't want to go through all this process again and have to find 1tb of space to be able to do this.

The two maximum render options I already knew about, but thanks for the confimation.

Have a look yourself in regards to this and let me know your thought's again.

[deleted user]

Ooooh now I see their comments thanks for the hint

They're talking about AE mate and AE indeed is sometimes weird and strangely inefficient about h264 video - though this weirdness (in my experience) is also usually limited to the actual editing and doesn't interfere with the final export (though I can imagine that in rare cases with very complex edits it *might* happen) - I have one rather big h264 based project that I ported from Premiere to AE (with the project import feature) and that one ran nice before and became a nightmare once in AE - but even so the export still worked fine and produced no glitches

You're just using Premiere and as said I've never had an issue like this in Premiere

I mean - unless you're using some extremely old version perhaps? Premiere Pro 6? heh

It's possible Premiere does have some issues with decoding that aren't noticeable with the bare eye - never heard of it tho

Edit - now I remember that AE did indeed have export issues once or twice but it was usually a kind of "footage missing" thing that was very obvious to spot

[X5gb]

I'm using Premiere CC 2018, latest, so no worries there. While there talking about AE here, other forums specifically mention Premiere as well, I believe they both use the same decompressor and they specifically mention not to import using h264, rather go lossless first, then import.

[deleted user]

Hmm - well I guess it might be worth doing a test to verify those claims then

Import a short h264 file then import that same file as a lossless 444 RGB avi then export them both separately again as 444 lossless RGB and then overlay both exports using a difference-mode (or just take screenshots of the exact same frame and switch between them) and see if there are any appreciable differences - I would expect that the only difference that might arise are slightly different colors because the color space handling will not be identical - but if the claims are true then you will see some differences when it comes to microdetails and artifacts

[alexp120]

I’m using AE for editing on a Windows 64-bit computer. I’ve been told that Adobe’s Media Encoder doesn’t do a good job in encoding to h264, so, what encoding software or method do you recommend?

[DoomBot]

I would either output an AVI and encode with script to x264 https://fanrestore.com/thread-1930.html or wait for this software to support it https://www.voukoder.org/forum/thread/11...88#post788 I'm sure you'd rather not wait though.