Using After Effects Plugins for Premiere Pro

[Tim Bickford]

Is it possible to use After Effects Plugins in Premiere Pro? If so are you limited to specific plugins?

[Ray Bell]

Tim, I was just wondering the same...

I just purchased Twixtor for AE but when I purchased the product and installed it the files where just written to a folder on the C drive and I
had to move them to the plug in folder for AE... but the plug in is claimed
to be Premiere Pro compliant and so all I did was move the same files into
the PP CS3 plug in folder and the application now works on both AE and PP...

So it kinda made me wonder if I moved some other plugins around from AE to PP that they too might work...

I'm going to try playing with this this weekend... it can't hurt but try..

[Tim Bickford]

Ray-

I'm going to try it today. I'll let you know what happens.

Tim

[Todd Kopriva]

Here's the word from one of the engineers responsible for the plug-in SDKs for After Effects and Premiere Pro:

After Effects plug-ins can run in Premiere Pro, but they have to limit their behavior and either 1) only call stuff available in both applications, 2) provide different After Effects and Premiere Pro versions, or 3) degrade their behavior gracefully depending on the host.

He mentions that RE:Vision Effects plug-ins are good examples of the most cross-host-compatible plug-ins.

I'll post back if I get more details from other engineers.

[Stephen Armour]

Hey Todd, when do we get CS3 in 64bit? Sure would be nice of Adobe to give us some hope...

[Todd Kopriva]

Tim Bickford wrote this:
> Hey Todd, when do we get CS3 in 64bit? Sure would be
> nice of Adobe to give us some hope...

I'm the wrong person to ask about that. And, surely, you must know that I wouldn't comment on plans for future products. ;-)

If the reason that you ask is because you want After Effects to be able to use more of your installed RAM, then I'll point out that the addition of multiprocessing support in After Effects CS3 is a big step in that direction. The address-space limitations for each process of a 32-bit application are mitigated by the fact that you can render with multiple After Effects background processes simultaneously. (See the "Memory usage and storage" and "Render multiple frames simultaneously" sections of After Effects CS3 Help on the Web for details.)

[Tim Bickford]

Basically I'm much more familiar and comfortable with P-Pro. I just want to be able use a few of my After Effects plugins without having to jump back and forth from AE & P-Pro.

I was able to use about 50% of my AE plugins in P-pro. The render times were slow on the ones that worked.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Todd Kopriva

Tim Bickford wrote this:
> Hey Todd, when do we get CS3 in 64bit? Sure would be
> nice of Adobe to give us some hope...

I'm the wrong person to ask about that. And, surely, you must know that I wouldn't comment on plans for future products. ;-)

If the reason that you ask is because you want After Effects to be able to use more of your installed RAM, then I'll point out that the addition of multiprocessing support in After Effects CS3 is a big step in that direction. The address-space limitations for each process of a 32-bit application are mitigated by the fact that you can render with multiple After Effects background processes simultaneously. (See the "Memory usage and storage" and "Render multiple frames simultaneously" sections of After Effects CS3 Help on the Web for details.)

I know you can't answer things like that Todd, just tweaking your beak...

The AE probs are not as serious as the PP3 probs under 32bit. The little trick Adobe copied to access more memory certainly helped.

Biggest prob we've had, is with editing Cineform'ed 1920x1080p material under PP3. When there is multilayer "big" video, especially with any large (but easily-within-limits large) bitmaps, it's a sure road to familiar Premiere crasholas (I've been doing this stuff for 20 yrs...) or error messages. Just not enough headroom for serious-sized video editing if you try to push things even a little bit.

We deal with this in several differents ways, none of which make an editor very happy:

- break our 30 min production into 10 parts, each of which is separate from the others (royal pain in the you-know-where, butt doable...)
- save your work every little bit, close your production and reload it, just to free precious memory resources. (another royal pain, also necessary)
- like every version of Premiere I've ever used under any version of Windows, with any combination of various workstations, with any size RAIDS or memory installed...it's always best to reboot regularly.
- use AE to do every complex video sequence, forgeting about the advantages of PP3 for quick testing/tryouts of new ideas

So, to answer your post: yes, I really would like to see Adobe give us some 64-bit hope for the future! The future is very much "high and higher res) and obviously 32-bit does not handle it well at all.

Many of us are already looking longingly at the greener FCP fields powered by their true 64-bit OS. May Adobe not forget it's roots nor it's main target user groups.