"We are very happy to announce that starting with After Effects (Beta) 23.0x11, H.264 is now available as an option in the Output Module Settings dialog allowing you to encode to H.264 directly from the AE Render Queue.
"

Great news !

A tip for everyone on a mac: export it as ProRes from AE (that's by far the quickest export anyway), and then open that file in Quicktime. Save it as 1080p (or whatever) from there, and Quicktime will convert it to h264 blazingly fast (much faster than AE could ever do, because Quicktime is so optimized for Apple's hardware). I've been doing this for years and it's actually a pretty decent workflow.

This is super important. If this can't be fixed at least remove Frame.io from After Effects and put it in Media Encoder, it makes no sense to send a gigantic file for review. I'm not going to upload a one-minute 10GB video file for review from Frame.IO, makes no sense.

The workarounds to send an H.264 via Frame.io are beyond annoying at this point.

Adobe is trash for removing this and they should be publicly shamed.

HSSSSSS, SHAME, SHAME, SHAME.

But seriously. Why are you such degenerates?

I cannot overstate what a massive PIA it was when Adobe removed direct H264 MP4 encoding from AE.

Putting in back in would be the single BIGGEST request I would have for AE. Granted I work in a pretty niche animation industry but MP4 rendering is integral to what I do and removal added all sorts of headaches to out daily workflow

I cannot overstate what a massive PIA it was when Adobe removed direct H264 MP4 encoding from AE.

Putting in back in would be the single BIGGEST request I would have for AE. Granted I work in a pretty niche animation industry but MP4 rendering is integral to what I do and removal added all sorts of headaches to out daily workflow

so far as I can tell, this is a simple case of petty tyranny.
There is a standard for light format lossy file sharing, it is not adobe's.
Adobe therefore removes support for it, but not their own, which is worse in every manner, including support, maturity, level of integration, and so on.

Adobe. your filetypes are trash. make them better or stop splashing around in file spec gene pool, you're messing it up for those of us who actually need performant programs. we know you don't care because you never use these programs internally, and it shows.

Still waiting for this to be solved.

It's faster to render out MOV directly from AE then convert it to MP4 in AME
than render out MP4 from AME (which often gets clogged and can't even finish the process).

EDIT:
I just found a solution for $20 there is a plugin called Anubis that export MP4 straight from AE.

I know this feature was requested back in 2018 but in 2022 it's more important than ever now that AE to ME dynamic link no longer works. Exporting Prores from AE and transcoding in ME is a time consuming process.
It is also an annoying step considering that we used to have the functionality to export MP4's directly from After Effects.

This would be so useful, I'd love just to be able to output as a high or medium quality H264 file straight from AE, without needing to worry about if Media Encoder is going to render it properly, or without having to render a .mov to then convert.

Hi Luke,

I started using the Voukoder codec, it adds every format I needed to AE and has an easy installer. The codec is free and helped a lot for me.

https://github.com/Vouk/voukoder
https://www.voukoder.org/forum/thread/783-downloads-instructions/

I cannot believe you've removed this feature.
I'm currently trying to export via AME which I don't want to have to do and it's saying it's failed to communicate with AME. I've tried updating everything via Adobe Cloud. I just don't want this today. I just want the quick and simple way, how it used to work.

Seriously, it seems like both the CG software companies I rely on (Adobe and Autodesk) literally go out of their way to screw their users with every new release. What absolute idiot thought it was a good idea to remove a whole bunch of formats and codecs from AE in this way? Not only does this complicate and slow down the output process, but Media Encoder absolutely sucks, and furthermore your render settings, file name, file format, codec, and output path now NO LONGER GET SAVED WITH YOUR AE PROJECT. This was my workflow for almost two decades -- save the project file with render module (or sometimes multiple output modules) so that you could always retrace your output steps, often a necessity in the professional world. But, apparently Adobe knows and cares nothing about the actual world of professional artists and animators. I really wonder who they think their user base is?

Please do this, ME is so slow to launch and any rendered frames in your comp in AE don't carry over like how they do in Ae renderer

For all things good, put quicktime output of H264 directly back into After Effects!

Please, add back a simple light codec like h264. Preferably h264. AME is garbage and I would never use it except I have to now. The decision to remove this was ludicrous. No here we are 8 years later. Clients and studios still ask for h264. I have to wait for AME to get its **** together. It’s slow. It’s awkward. The default settings are trash. It feels like a 30 year old program. Just let me render from the render queue and trim the fat for crissakes. Get all of those effects and codecs no one uses out of there.

As Adobe Media Encoder doesn't render the same way After Effects does this is a critical feature. If whatever causes AME to render differently than after effects was fixed I would be OK with just using Adobe Media Encoder.

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911308-media-encoder/suggestions/34857124-fix-whatever-causes-effects-to-render-differently

Media Encoder: Slow To Launch. Slow to add items into the Queue. Slow to change encoding presets/setting. Non-Intuitive to change render quality and image sequence naming in Media Encoder. Inconsistency between AE Render Queue features/settings and ME. Currently using ME is a big time suck and kills momentum. Please return the H264 feature to AE.

SERIOUSLY!!! PLEASE ADD IT BACK!

H264 is still the most widely used codec & the lack of exporting it straight from AE is hallucinatory,
There is a free AE plugin similar to After codecs called voukoder which evolves quickly & contains many HW acceleration encodings.
https://www.voukoder.org/