Tricks for Smoothly Editing H.264 in After Effects

Adobe After Effects is an ideal video editing tool for r creating sophisticated motion graphics and cinematic visual effects. You probably would like to import some video source like H.264 to After Effects for further editing. While, when loading H.264 files to After Effects, you may come across problems like this: "no display of audio or video, can't view a complete file, basically unusable...". In this article, we will discuss deeply on this issue.

Actually, we can access kinds of H.264 files like from GoPro H.264(mp4), Canon EOS H.264(.mov), Nikon DSLR H.264(.mov) or some downloaded H.264 (.avi). But in After Effects format list, it can only support H.264 (.m4v) format. To make all H.24 clips compatible with After Effects, you need an app like Brorsoft Video Converter, which can help you to convert H.264 to a more editable format for After Effects.

Overall, the program can be used as an professional yet easy-to-use H.264 file converter. With it, you can effortlessly transcode H.264 to MPEG-2, which will create an After Effects friendly file format keeping the original quality. Besides After Effects, this software can also export DNxHD for Avid, MPEG-2 for Adobe Premiere Pro/Premiere Element/Sony Vegas Pro, AVI for Pinnacle Studio, WMV to Windows Movie Maker and more NLE systems for native editing. For Mac users, Video Converter for Mac is the right choice. Just download it and follow the tutorial below to get the work done.

Download the H.264 video converter:

(Note: Click here for OS X 10.5)

How to convert H.264 footage for editing in After Effects

Step 1: Add H.264 video files

Install and launch the H.264 to MPEG-2 converter and load source H.264 clips to it. You can batch convert multiple video clips as you want.

Step 2: Choose output format

This video converter offers optimized format preset for After Effects. Just click "Format" menu firstly and then follow "Adobe Premiere/Sony Vegas" to set MPEG-2 format.

Tip- Profile Settings:

In case the default settings do not fit your requirement, you can click "Settings" button and enter "Profile Settings" panel to adjust video size, bit rate, frame rate, sample rate and audio channels.

Step 3: Start H.264 video conversion

Click "Convert" button to start encoding H.264 video to .mpg for importing to After Effects. When the conversion task is finished, click "Open" button to get the exported files and then import the converted H.264 files into After Effects to do further editing without any issue.