I agree that AME can be a dog's dinner depending on which options and hardware you are using (e.g. We've already seen what happens when trademark lawyers get in touch with Adobe. So in terms of H.264 encoding (or any other codec) there is nothing of value to 'buy out', and since ffmpeg is GPL-licensed code Adobe cannot integrate it into their products without a Pandora's Box of legal issues - not least the fact that ffmpeg violates Apple's trademarks by encoding ProRes. You can do the same thing yourself for free, you're paying for a user interface that manages the workflow automatically.
They simply tell AE to render a frame sequence (you can run that as a set of parallel jobs, hence the lauded speed improvements), then they pass the folder of images to ffmpeg's command-line encoder. or if a great restaurant didn't supply cutlery.ĪfterCodecs and RenderGarden are just wrappers for ffmpeg. It would be like if Maya didn't let you render. Management should seriously consider this. I would suggest that Adobe buy out and integrate After Codecs.