Exported Video is just about 20% longer

[Sicro]

Hey guys!

I will provide images etc. later since I am rendering the imported video as image sequence right now.

So I rendered a 30 FPS Video (3d animation, total lenght about 5 minutes) in 3ds Max, imported the sequences, added audio (not the best idea to dot his in after effects in retrospective <.<) and exported it as a 30 FPS video h.264, 16 Mbit/s, aside from some hue changes which is one of those issues that really can get you angry (which i resolved more or less) everything worked OK so far.

Now comes the tricky part. I used Hybrid to generate frames in between via the avisynth InterFrame Filter, which also worked even better than expected!

But for some reason, no matter what settings I use in hybrid I can not get an audio track for the full 5 min video (it works with the same settings for short clips of 50 sec just fine but for some *%$§"%§" reason not witht he full video). Okay so I thought, I got the Video, just import it into AE again, add the audio, export and you should be fine....

When exported the Video is 1 minute longer, it is 6:18 instead of 5:18, the audio though has the correct length of 5:18.

I interpreted the footage and it said 60 FPS. When exporting with AE it does let me set the FPS, but since my composition is at 60FPS this should be fine, right?

Inside After Effects everything looks and sounds fine. The video and audio track align, when RAM previewing parts of it, everything is as it should be. When exported it is just about 20% longer.

I begin to hate the h.264 *.mp4 stuff, since it only brought problems and slowed me down a lot.

Thanks in advance for any asnwers and I will provide pictures if needed, as soon as my AE finished rendering!

[Sicro]

Damn, how do I edit my opening post?

Forgot to include that I am working with After Effects CS6

[Dave_LaRonde]

Don't use mp3 audio.  Convert it to wav or aiff.  And you may have to shut down your machine and start it up again to get things to work right in a brand-new AE project.

[Sicro]

Is there any specific reason as to why mp3 audio shouldn't be used?

Before all the Hybrid for the 60FPS stuff I used a bunch of different audio file formats and I had no issues up until now.

I restarted, but the issue seems to persist, even though I used the image sequence I just rendered out (insterad of just importing the 60 FPS video - see my first post).

It's really fishy: The output always seems to have 51.2 FPS, no matter if I interpret the footage or not. Even when using an image sequence and TELLING after effects that this is a 60FPS sequence it in the end still has 51.2.

[Dave_LaRonde]

Sicro  wrote

Is there any specific reason as to why mp3 audio shouldn't be used?

Yes -- there are many different varieties of mp3 compression, and not all work in AE.  It's ALWAYS better to be safe and convert.

[Kyle Hamrick]

I think *technically* the "don't use mp3" thing might no longer be an issue with current versions?
I don't use them out of habit anyway, and again, since you're on an older version, it might still be the case.

In general, if you're feeding your multimedia program a heavily-compressed format, it has to do some work behind the scenes to use it, which might slow you down, and it's possible it may mis-translate something.

[Kyle Hamrick]

Not sure if this will be the culprit, but...
It's also typically recommended that you don't export h.264 directly out of AE. It's better to make a master file in an uncompressed or other high-quality codec, then run that through Media Encoder to create your h.264. (You can also now queue comps directly into AME, but since I see you're still on CS6, that's not an option for you.)

[Sicro]

Thank you for your reply and I read that too, I did that but then it really got on my nerves with all the exporting but you are probably right, I should try the AME again.

Btw. I once tried to queue my comp directly into AME and it worked, but it was way slower than directly from After Effects, which is strange to me (there are some additional settings in AME but when the Bitrate is the same and also only 1 pass is used the time should be similar?).

[Kevin-Monahan]

Did you ever solve this issue, Sicro? Did any of the advice here help you out? Let us know.

Thanks,

Kevin