Hey guys,
I just wanted to share my experience from yesterday.
That Adobe Media Encoder does a better job in encoding than After Effects’ built in Encoder is something I heard quite often, but I never did really bother as I didn’t thought the diference would be that dramatic.
Yesterday I had to send a preview to a client and I used the same encoding I use everytime for previews: Quicktime h.264, 80% Quality. This always looked good with reasonable file size.
The project was already prerendered as image sequence, I just did some simple retiming, added audio and needed to encode it to a video format.
But I had a strange problem as I got artefacts appearing always at the same moment (no it was not a player problem). I tried to set AE to do a (codec-) keyframe every second, I even encoded in Quicktime Foto-Jpeg format. Always artefacts.
Then I thought, okay, I know that AME is better with h.264 codecs, let give that a try.
And what shall I say, dramatic difference.
- First of all, no artefacts.
- Then, with the same settings in AME and AE (Quicktime h.264, 80% Quality), the perfect looking video that came out of AME was 37mb in size, while the AE result (with artefacts) was 150mb!
- Playback was more smooth and the audio sync felt much better (could be due to smaller filesize).
- Rendertime was a bit quicker.
So if there is anyone out there who hasn’t tried the AME, do it now. I was totally baffled of the difference. At least with AE CS6 (maybe with CC the internal AE encoder has improved).