I recently ran into a reoccurring issue where the sharing of floating licenses for plugins causes issues with the ability to render files out of After Effects. In my case it’s the Red Giant line of plugins being stubborn and watermarking everything. Nothing like a plugin server not releasing a license to waste hours of your day.
What do you do when you have a video file that either has the right visual but the wrong audio or vice versa; where the audio is correct but the visual is wrong?
I reached a solution that avoids the need to open any editing software altogether. I needed to replace the music that I remixed in Adobe Premiere into an animation created in After Effects. But with a plugin effect error due to licensing not allowing me to re-render the file, all because I don’t want to introduce additional compressing of the file in the round about importing solution type of way, the “right way” isn’t possible.
The answer is REMUXING. Essentially, the goal is to separate the video file into it’s visual and audio tracks and replace the needed portions with the choice tracks and then save it out as a new file; all while not re-encoding or re-rendering.
This is the software I used:
https://avidemux.sourceforge.net
With this method, I’m able to avoid introducing additional compression/ artifacting as well as save myself a bunch of time waiting around for my render to export. In my recent case it was upwards of 6 minutes for a preview render; compounding rendering times for anything longer form or harder to render – LOOKING AT YOU SIZZLE REELS!
The files have no issues on playback and processing was a straight forward experience. Hope this helps anyone looking for a good solution to this dumb ol’ problem!
