Must Kill Interlacing: Getting Quality h.264 Screen Video Out Of After Effects

While converting a Jing swf to h.264 with AfterEffects I was really struggling to get video that looked reasonable using the h.264 profile built into AE. I was massively ramping up bitrate settings without any noticeable improvements. Strangely things looked ok when played back in QuickTime, but not so great in Flash Player. After a few false starts I finally realized that by default After Effects was interlacing the video.

Interlacing delivers half the lines of vertical resolution per frame. This is never a good thing for computer / web based video and was especially noticeable at the low framerate (10 fps) the Jing swf was recorded at. After switching to progressive (no interlacing) and taking the bitrates to the floor I got the pristine quality and small file size that h.264 is known for.

Its bizarre that interlacing is on by default and the encoding options dialog in After Effects isn’t exactly Adobe’s best UI experience ever, but at least the option is there and visible if you squint hard enough. Hope this saves someone else the frustration.