I am working with After Effects CS 5.5, and exported a template compositition with constant moving gradients of similar colors in the background. I needed this to play in locally in Powerpoint off the harddrive, so I exported using Media Encoder CS 5.5 1920x1080p 29.97fps, Main Concept H.264, High, Level 5.1, VBR 2 Pass, Maximum Depth, Target Bit Rate 40Mbps, Maximum Bit Rate 300Mbps, Gaussian Blur 2, Container .MP4, Maximum Render Quality Option, and this got me acceptable results. Lowering the level even to 4.2 made the quality noticably bad and I would not want to submit this content for the client.
This render took a LONG time, 10 hours to be exact, and thus I am a little disappointed by the jerky playback I am getting. It can't be the bitrate, can it, since that setting is mostly for streaming over the internet? To add two different soundtracks, I exported the files from Premiere to Media Encoder CS6 with the default bitrates (32 target, 40 max), all other settings the same, and the playback is still jerky (and I managed to keep the quality despite 2 encodes).
I came across this thread http://forums.adobe.com/thread/489667 that seems to have my answer, but the information is old as Media Encoder now uses the MainConcept codec for H.264 encodes. Will this help, or is there another way of editing the script to get smooth playback, without re-rendering the composition, or rendering to .mov and transcoding using quicktime or media encoder to .mp4 (.mpg)?
this is the code for my movie. I am wondering what the code I need to put in for which container to make it playback more smoothly?