A question to those who use Particle Illusion with Premiere.

How do you export your effect?

Do you:

A) Render out the clip that the effect will be on with Premiere and use it as a background in PI, apply the particle effect and then render as a separate clip and replace it with the original in Premiere?

Or

B) Make the effect against a Black background and export as a series of TIF (Or other files that support Alpha Channels), then bring it into premiere (How do you bring 100s of images into Premiere as a each-image-is-a-single-frame sequence, like you can in After Effects?) and then key out the black/alpha channel?

I can do the compositing easily enough in After Effects, but I'd like to be able to do it in Premiere without having to render first, obviously option B is the easiest...Does anyone know how it's done?

Also, if I have to do it the long way, can DV-AVI be exported many times without losing quality? IE; there wont be a difference in quality between the original footage and the footage that's been composited on in AE and then exported and brought back into Premiere?

I don't use Premiere, but I do use PI and AE, usually rendering particles against black (un-premultiplied) w/alpha as TGA, comp with the shot in AE, then render a TGA sequence of the comp. There's no quality loss in this pipeline, even with numerous particles layers, since the TGA's are uncompressed.

Since Premiere should be able to use an AE comp the same as any other clip, the best approach is really to render particles from PI with alpha channel, comp in AE, then edit in Premiere without having to render the comp.

Premiere can't seem to import a series of images as one sequence though, it comes out as a lot of different clips on the timeline and not one like AE, just out of interest, is there a way to import lots of images as a sequence like in AE?


Thanks, by the way.

Hmmm, I just tried importing an AE saved file into Premiere and I got an error saying that Dynamic Link is only available with Adobe Production Studio, I only bought Premiere 2.0 and AFter Effects 7 with a student discount, so I didn't get the production studio...Am I going to have to deal with a lot of rendering now or somehow import hundreds of images and set them to a one frame duration, or can AE export to an image sequence, so those hundreds of images would just be one clip? So in effect I'd be:

Render the clip out in Premiere
Edit with PI using the clip as a background reference
Export just the particle layer from PI as TGA images
Impot the TGA as a sequence into AE
Comp the sequence onto the original footage
Export as a sequence of TGA?

Is it not recommended to do all the comping in PI itself (ie, using the original video as a background which I add effects directly on and then export both the background video and the effects as a single, video files {seeing as premiere can't import a set of images as an effect} and then put that in Premiere?

Just a side note; When working with effects of any kind, such as CGI compositions on live footage etc, is it always recommended to output the affected clip as a sequence of images rather than a video, or would exporting to uncompressed AVI (or when working with DV, DV-AVI) be just as good?

Is there generation loss with DV-AVI when rendering a lot of times? (render a clip, then render that clip, then render that clip)?