PPro / AE / Encore project communication

[Robert Baynosa]

Originally Posted by Kevin Currie

I have a slower computer, so when I bring the AE comps back into PPro, it does tend to slow down my timeline quite a bit (depending on the AE Effects used), so once I am positive that the clip is perfect, I do render it in AE and replace the DL clip in PPro.

yes but that kinda defeats the purpose of dynamic linking

[Walter Brokx]

Originally Posted by Robert Baynosa

yes but that kinda defeats the purpose of dynamic linking

It really depends on whether you make a lot of changes (where you don't need to export anything) before replacing it with the outputrender. In that case he still has the benefit of dynamic linking, but he chooses for 'speed' once the AE part is done.

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Bogdan Nicolau

PS:Look at the Creative Cow's video at min. 3:25, its said that in CS5, dynamic link is not anymore an one way ticket, you can do modifications in PPro and they will show up in AE and viceversa.

Yes, that's what it says. Unfortunately, that's not what I see. What I see is a one way street. I can't even get anyone at the Adobe forums to answer this question. So I've got to go with what the software actually does for me, which is a one way street. Interesting that you get different behavior. I wish I knew how.

[Ann Bens]

Originally Posted by Bruce Watson

I had a project that used just PPro and Encore to make a DVD. All set up with menus and buttons that matched up with the PPro chapter markers, all that. Works fine.

But the client wanted to do more work. Wanted more sophisticated color grading, and motion graphics for the lower thirds. So, months later, I opened up the PPro project in AE and went to work. So far, so good.

Now that I'm ready to reintegrate it, it dawns on me that I don't really know how. I've basically got two projects instead of one. I'm thinking I should be able to use dynamic link to import the AE changes to PPro. But how, exactly, does it want me to accomplish this? When I pull up "File...Adobe Dynamic Link...Import After Effects Composition" and navigate to the *.aep file, the pop-up window gives me the option to import all the bits and pieces, or just individual bits. Do I want to import everything?

And once I import whatever it is I'm supposed to import, what do I do with it? In other words, how do I get the AE changes into my PPro timeline? I'd obviously like to have Encore still be able to find the chapter markers, etc.

I'm just asking before I screw up a lot of work...

I keep telling myself that eventually I won't be such an Adobe newbie. I've been telling myself that for years now. ;-)

Just for testing.
Fire up AE and make a composition.
Open and excisting Pro project and import this composition.
Go back to AE and make some changes to this comp and go back to Pro and you will see this updated instantly in Pro.
Now you have another clip in Pro you want to do some stuff to it in AE then right mouse click and choose Replace with AE composition.
This clip will open in the AE comp already openend.
Make some changes to this clip and you will see it is updated instantly in Pro.
That is two way Dynamic Link.
You cannot do this in previous versions as it would reply with DL allready busy or something like that.

[Pete Bauer]

Ok, I've merged Bruce's second thread on this same topic into this one. We don't really want multiple discussions on the same topic going on so we're putting all the curent dynamic link discussions under one roof here.

As Ann illustrated and I described yesterday, Dynamic Link goes one way for a given instance, but if you are using unique assets to make sure no sequences, comps, or clips -- even if nested -- are trying to make a round trip that would result in an endless loop (in which case the DL with the circular reference is error trapped and simply won't work), DL has functionality in both directions. Several versions back, I believe it was only one way. Can't even remember any more but I think an AE comp could be put into PPro, but not the other direction way back when.

Use File > Dynamic Link... to get the following capabilities:

- a Sequence from PPro becomes a Comp within an AE project
- a clip from the PPro project panel becomes an asset in an AE project
- an AE Comp becomes a Sequence within a By two way

[Robert Baynosa]

im thinking of getting an ssd to speed up workflows that involve dynamic linking.
from what ive seen in resource monitor and gpu-z, my cpu, gpu, memory are not even half of their capacity when i get the dynamic link lag/stutters. also from what ive read around here and in the adobe forums, on a fairly modern setup, the first bottleneck would most likely be the storage media. additioanlly, from the basic knowledge i have about pixel bender and how plugins work, they read and analyze raw video per pixel to come out with the effect - that gotta be a whole lot of reads and writes.

how has the performance been for you people who have migrated to ssd's?

[Bogdan Nicolau]

I thought to myself about buying an SSD to speed up the programs responsiveness and to keep the swap memory file.Even with one i7 clocked at 4,2 and 24 GB ram, the speed that dynamic link make changes from one application to another is very, very slow when working with 100-200 short clips.If I make modifications on only one clip, dynamic link is not so clever to reconform only that file.It reconforms ALL clips.

I would really like to know if migrating the OS on a SSD have something to do with how fast dynamic link operates, but from what i observed, PPro and AE gets very busy and unresponsive when conforming the modified files on the cache and media drives (different disks, not raid for now).

I have the feeling that not the OS drive have to be the fastest, but the drive where you keep the media and the one where the apps write their cache.

[Robert Baynosa]

I'm thinking the same thing too. the biggest benefit of an ssd will be as a media and scratch disk. using it as an os/programs drive will make your computer snappier in general (boot up, loading etc.) however most of AE and PPro is loaded into memory.

The main benefits of SSD's is faster random reads/writes, sometimes by a factor of 1000. the way i see it, this random seeks are the bottleneck of dyanimc link and NLE editing in Adobe in general. I'm really hoping someone with an SSD can chime in.