The AE team is pretty tiny, so putting their resources towards making AE work better at VFX, compositing, and motion graphics, and letting the Adobe Media Encoder team work on encoding things makes sense to me.
If you talk to a lot of the old-timers around here, they'll tell you that AE's h.264 encoder was buggy and didn't do a good job. Here's the Adobe Blog post about the removal: using Adobe Media Encoder to create H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV videos from After Effects So, I will work in CC 2015 to enjoy the snappier interface and then open that project file in CC 2014 to render it with multiprocessing (since my system can utilize that feature really well in most projects). After Effects Discussions How to export in Quicktime H.264 format 0 How to export in Quicktime H.264 format trevorb608536 New Here, I noticed that in the update on After Effects on my windows 10 machine I can no longer export in Quicktime H.264 format. This is because AE CC 2014 has multiprocessing.
You can either render to an intermediate codec from AE or send your AE comp directly to the Adobe Media Encoder. After Effects no longer encodes directly into H.264 (it didn't do a great job of it in the past).
