Script: add to adobe media encoder

Question

Hello guys!
First of all congrats about the new features, and the badass look of After Effects. I really enjoy it!
But I'm really disappointed to see that the h264 render function is gone. That really destroyed my workflow   boom!
Because I have a lot of jobs for an event hall, where I'm doing very often 360 degrees projection mappings, and the global resolution there is around 26 000 px width. What we usually do, because we're using watchout as playback system and handling all the projectors, is splitting h264 movies to theirs maximum width resolution. The things is that for example for an event we have around 20 - 30 animations, and 1 animation is split in 6 movies.. What we usually did -  we wrote a small script which splits automatically the movie into 6, pre-compose them all, align them all  and renders all the videos with predefined h264 settings. So .... my question now is.. how can I modify my script and set it to send all the pre-composed, resized, aligned, new comps to Adobe Media Encoder and use a predefined h264 render setting? I couldn't find anywhere more info about the scripting bridge between AE and Media Encoder.
Cheers,
Marin
PS: I know that we can use Final Cut Pro or Motion to get more resolution from the h264.. but it's kind of workflow that I used to work.. everything happens in one application.. and no annoying hundred times save as, render as etc

Answer 1

Hi Marin,
It's true that it's a pain to handle the encoding of h.264 outside of AE.  You can write a script that calls the app.executeCommand() function and passes in the code that invokes the "Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue..." found under AE's Composition menu.  The correct, numerical, code for that command is 3800.  So you would just iterate through the comps you wanted and then open them in the main viewer using the .openInView() method which brings them into focus so-to-speak.  Once it's open you can then send the comp to AME with app.executeCommand(3800).  On the AME side, you would have to make a default template for the render output settings you would want.  When your script adds a comp to the AME queue it will take those settings. 
Now, you could do all that, but have you seen AEmpeg that aescripts posted yesterday?  It allows you to render to 100s of codecs using ffmpeg right from AE.  While it costs some money, at least it will open up the door to a streamlined workflow and a variety of codecs that you might need.
--Arie