As noted nearly everywhere motion graphics artists congregate on the web, QuickTime 7.4 and After Effects don’t play nicely together. Apparently Apple’s movie rental DRM scheme is the culprit. Any QuickTime render from After Effects that requires more than 10 minutes will generate a permissions error.
There are two obvious options to address the issue:
- Downgrade to QuickTime 7.3
- Render an image sequence and then piece that sequence together in either QuickTime Pro or After Effects.
I’m not a huge fan of downgrading because you just never know if you’re going to break something in the process. If 7.4 is working for you aside from this pesky After Effects error, you might want to try this work around. It adds an extra step in After Effects, but it works. Follow these steps:
- When it comes time to render your After Effects composition, take that composition and nest it in another composition with the same settings by dragging the composition to the New Composition icon in the Project window.
- Select the original composition in the project window.
- Go to the Composition menu and select Pre-Render. The original composition has now been added to your Render Queue.
- In the Render Queue, edit the Output Module settings so that you are creating an image sequence. (I like .psd files for this because the file sizes are reasonable and the files are written quickly.)
- Now add the new sequence with the original sequence nested in it to your Render Queue. Set its Output Module to the desired QuickTime settings. Since this sequence will render in much less than 10 minutes, you should have no problem getting a valid QT movie out of After Effects without reverting to an earlier version of QuickTime.
This adds just a couple of minutes to your total render time, and you can leave After Effects to do its thing with a long render without having to manually piece the image sequence together in QuickTime Pro.
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Nice Post!! I’ve been praying for an alternative video format for professionals for the last couple of years, quicktime just gets more and more aimed at web stuff, avi’s don’t have any good lossless codecs and image sequences are a pain to move around.
Another work around I’ve been using is to first queue the comp to render as a sequence, in the post render actions choose “Set Proxy” and then queue the same comp again as a quicktime, that way you get the whole thing done in one step without creating extra comps. Just make sure you set the render settings for proxies to “Current Settings” for the second render.
I’ve really got into rendering image sequences recently, it’s a nuisance if you have to render a lot of comps (setting up destination folders takes a bit of time, anyone know a script for that) and it does need to render to a quicktime too which adds a bit of time, but if you’re having a lot of crashes (I’ve been getting a lot of image buffer errors due to huge source files) it’s really worth it, I usually choose the multi machine settings with tweaks for comp length and proxy settings. When the render crashes just open the project again and hit render, it will pick up from where it crashed (usually a good idea to check the last rendered frame though as it might be corrupt).
There are two other advantages to rendering sequences, the first is that you only have to open the project on another machine and hit render to start a combined network render (ie no need to collect and watch folder). The second part I love is that if I need to revise any part of the sequence all I have to do is delete the frames I don’t like and hit render again, it will automatically just fill the “holes” in the sequence without patching quicktimes together.
For all these make sure the “Skip existing files” checkbox is on or it won’t work.
Glennser
Posted by on 02/08 at 02:01 PM