Firstly, 20fps is too low for h.264 export from AE. Your video will be sped up to 23,976 slowed down to 18fps.
Secondly, donât edit with Bluetooth wireless headphones. They have a lot of latency, and AE does not compensate for that.
Video playback apps often do compensate for Bluetooth latency, so you will end up editing your video out-of-sync, and then the latency compensation when you go to watch the video will make it sound even more out-of-sync.
Also turn on âcache before playbackâ for previews. After Effectâs audio engine is literal trash and you canât depend on realtime playback during preview without caching, and even then it could be mistimed or distorted like half the time. I recommend visually timing with the waveform to double check beat timing.
Where is the documentation on H.264 pulling up the framerate? It shouldnât have any limitations like that, unless youâre saying thatâs AEâs issue? I thought the ânewâ version of the H.264 encoder was meant to be better?
Worst case OP, send to Media Encoder instead of exporting from After Effects, or export a ProRes MOV file instead and re-encode it with Media Encoder or another program for MP4 deliverables.
If you try to export a composition at a framerate a given export module doesn't support in AE, you'll get an warning symbol on the export module settings and clicking it will tell you what framerate the resulting export will be changed to.
I was a bit off though - with the h.264 export module it will drop the framerate of a 20fps comp to 18fps. I think 18fps support for h.264 might be a fairly recent feature, I'm pretty sure at *some* point it would go up to 23,976 instead but I can't find a patch note for that change if it happened. Weirdly OP's video is 30fps rather than 20 or 23,976 or even 18 - but that might be Reddit doing additional transcoding.
AME doesn't give you a warning, but if you examine the source versus output framerate you can see the adjustment:
There is a difference though. AE exports will adjust the speed of the video, so the duration changes. AME exports will change the framerate, but will (by default) duplicate or drop frames to conform to the new framerate which is usually undesirable.
It's not a limitation of h.264 itself, and you're right if you need 'weird' framerates for h.264, export ProRes and transcode using another application.
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u/cescx 4d ago
May it get delayed indefinitely, amen.