<\/span><\/h2>\nWell, it was Adobe's decision, really.<\/p>\n
Up until a few After Effects Versions ago, After Effects was perfectly capable of natively saving your Video as an MP4.<\/p>\n
But Adobe got rid of the feature in After Effects CC, as it was too “difficult” to maintain across multiple applications.<\/p>\n
For the user's sake, they wanted everyone to export their projects to yet another application that would then render everything in the desired format - MP4. This additional application is called Media Encoder.<\/p>\n
So, now you have to send your After Effects Composition to Media Encoder to access output formats such as MP4.<\/p>\n
This doesn't sound too bad, you get a specialized application that can render really well, right?<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this is far from the truth, as Media Encoder Renderings take much longer than what After Effects was formerly capable of all on its own.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that's why you can't export an MP4 directly from After Effects anymore.<\/p>\n
In German, we would say Adobe “verschlimmbesserte” After Effects - which means “to make something worse with so-called improvements”.<\/p>\n
<\/span>How do I export a Video from After Effects<\/span><\/h2>\nTo clearly show how you can export an MP4 from After Effects, here's a quick detour on how to actually export anything \/ a video from After Effects.<\/p>\n
You might've figured this out already and it's pretty straightforward.<\/p>\n
When you're done with your project to export it to any kind of file format, you have to first add it to the Render Queue.<\/p>\n
The Render Queue is a list of Compositions that you can define and add to, that After Effects will then work through one at a time, once you click the “Render” button.<\/p>\n
You can add your compositions to the After Effects Render Queue in three ways:<\/p>\n