Fix h.264 Adobe After Effects!!

Adobe After Effects, hands down is one of the best editing software I have ever came across. Editing, animating & creating something unique is a daily game when it comes to this very software. All the movies we watch nowadays with lots of intensive visual effects has a fair probability of being rendered using After Effects itself.

The issue with the software arises when we start to create a new project. Soon when you finish your edits and head towards rendering it, the size of file with highest/medium settings comes out to be very large. Adding to it the rendering time also increases depending upon the duration of the clip. So before moving to the fix, lets talk about the importance of h.264 codec and why we need it.

h.264

H.264 is a video codec standard, which is also known as AVC. The AVC stands for Advanced Video Coding MPEG-4 PT 10. H.264 codec can achieve high quality video in relatively very low bit rates. It is from one of the most commonly used formats for recording, distribution and compression of video content. Other than that it supports resolutions up to 4K UHD. Hence the h.264 video codec enclosure will lead us for best quality video rendering as well as with reduced size. So we will be requiring the following codec to be installed on the system.

How to fix?

So to fix the issue, we will install the quicktime alternative on our system. What this will do is, it will install the h.264 codec availability in After Effects. So lets start:

1. Download the Quicktime Alternative application. Link 1 (DropBox) , Link 2 (Free Codecs)
2. Click next and install the Application.
3. When the installation is complete, simply restart your PC.
4. Now open up After Effects, select your clip and hit composition to select the “add to render queue” option.
5. Then click Output Modules: lossless (yellow color text), to open up the module option. There select the Format to open up the dropdown menu to choose “Quicktime“. (Which we installed).
6. After that click the “Format options” box, to select h.264 option from the Video Codecs dropdown list.

Alternate Method

If installing the Quicktime doesn’t solve the problem, then using this method will be the only option left for you. Unfortunately in my case I had to rely on this following method to render my video in h.264. We will now install another application by Adobe called AME (Adobe Media Encoder) on the system. After the installation of the application we will use AME to render our clip in h.264 format.

1. Download and install Adobe Media Encoder (AME) software on the system.
2. After that open the software and minimize it.
3. When your video edit is finished in After Affects, click on the composition option and select “Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue“.
4. It will open the footage in AME, there you will find lots of options for rendering. Just select the h.264 option and render your project and save it.

The output video’s file size would be less, because we used the h.264 container. Now simply upload and share the clip without any worries. Don’t hassle to use the comment box down below for any problems. Stay tuned!!