If you regularly create broadcast spots in After Effects and make delivery online you no doubt have dealt with DG FastChannel now and again. Well, there’s a nice surprise hiding inside Adobe Media Encoder CS5. Two FastChannel presets are built right in. You can’t get to them from the render queue in After Effects. But that’s okay, because the connection between AE and Media Encoder with Dynamic Link just got better. You can now connect directly to an .aep file right from Media Encoder—whether After Effects is running or not. When you do it provides a list of comps in that project. Select the comp you want to encode and add it to your queue. Select MPEG2 under Format, and then change the Preset to DG Fastchannel 480 (or 512). Done! Media Encoder will even automatically FTP the resulting file to FastChannel if you set it up to do so.
