Why is my project rendering with a different background?

[scottramsay]

Hello and thank you for taking the time to view my dilemma

As you can see in my photo, I have made a project using a white background

Although, after using Adobe Media Encoder, my video looks like this:

In After Effects, I use 16:9 settings with a white background. In AME, I use H.264 at medium bitrate.

I have tried changing the background to grey but still the video renders with a dark black and the writing in the animation can't be seen.

I am very grateful for any help you can offer !!!

Regards, Scott

[Mylenium]

Provide a screenshot of your timeline structure.

Mylenium

[scottramsay]

Here is a screenshot

[P.M.B]

Rick is right. I can see in your screenshot that you do not have transparency enabled.  If i'm right then what you did is when creating the composition, set the background color to white.  This is not a real background & it confuses alot of people because...why would there be a background there that isn't really there?  It's stupid.  To enable transparency click the checkerboard icon just the left of where it says "active camera" at the bottom of the preview panel and then add a solid to the bootom of your layer stack, like Rick said.

[scottramsay]

I have also tried it with new projects and the problem persists... although I did a 5 second animation yesterday and it didn't have this problem..

[scottramsay]

Another clue ive just found... if I draw a white box over the whole project in After Effect, it renders as white(obviously). But why does it render as black when I take it away?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi scottramsay,

Looks like a frustrating problem. Sorry about that. Since you got the issue, did you ever have any luck in finding a solution? It would be interesting to know what solved your problem. Please let us know if you have a moment.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

I will bet that you set your Composition Background color to white. There are no pixels in that white comp background, it's transparent. In fact there is no reason to ever set the composition background color unless you are intentionally trying to add a specific color to the aliased edges of a video with a transparent background by rendering with the Premultiplied with Alpha color mode. This is highly unlikely. You could verify that there are no pixels in your white areas by simply turning on the transparency grid.

If you want a white background put a white solid or shape layer on the bottom of the composition.

These are basic AE principals that you should know. Just jumping into AE because you are pretty good at figuring out software is a big mistake. You need to spend some serious time learning what the gazillion switches and knobs inside AE do and you need to learn about video standards, color channels, color modes, frame rates, compression and a bunch of other things.