After Effects and MPEG
by Jayson Tin
on
May 18, 2008 at 3:46:25 pm
Hello. I recently bought After Effects (after reading all the tutorials on here showing what you could do with it!) but I ran into some little problems.
#1- AE can't import my MPEG-2 files. I read online that you had to convert it to a .MOV or .AVI, so I tried to use a program called Magic Video Converter to do it. After doing that, I could import it into AE, but the .avi only shows a black screen, and the .mov a white screen. I also tried MPEG Streamclip 1.1, but it gave me an error saying that 'MPEG 2 codec is not installed, buy it or install QT Alternative'
I installed QT Alternative, but that does not solve the error.
How do I get AE to recognize and import my MPEG-2 footage successfully?
#2- Because of my limited hard drive space, I always compress my videos after I render them, using Ashampoo Movie Shrink and Burn 3. If I try to import a compressed video, the video loads, but AE won't detect the audio. It will only detect audio from movies freshly rendered from Sony Vegas. How can I get it to detect audio from all my other files? (PS Ashampoo MS&B 3 compresses the videos as a Xvid MPEG-4 .avi file.
Re: After Effects and MPEG by Simon Bonner on May 18, 2008 at 6:54:33 pm
AE does not deal well with any footage that has interframe compression. It also doesn't deal well with uncompressed audio. In fact, you're better off using another programme to process audio.
Re: After Effects and MPEG by Simon Bonner on May 18, 2008 at 9:23:42 pm
Interframe compression is the basis of formats like MPEG. You would need an uncompressed version of your footage. I think I read that you already tried to render Quicktime versions of your files: make sure you don't render using compressed codecs like MPEG4 - render usng the animation codec or photo jpeg (and make sure you have a good many free gigs of hard drive space, animations are generally massive). Or uncompressed AVI should work too. Not sure why you've had problems with AVIs so far, maybe they were compressed? DivX?
Re: After Effects and MPEG by Jayson Tin on May 19, 2008 at 5:45:04 pm
Yes, I think that my video converting program compresses it when I convert it. From the drop down list of compression options, I do not see an 'Uncompressed' option.
Also, I was wondering, is there a codec I could download that would allow AE to import my MPEG2 footage? Thanks :)
Re: After Effects and MPEG by Simon Bonner on May 19, 2008 at 11:03:25 pm
There's none that I know of. If you're having trouble with your conversion software, perhaps you could import your footage into your NLE of choice and render it from there prior to importing into AE. Premiere, for example, has an option to render as uncompressed avi.
