After Effects & Premiere Work Mix

[Robert Double]

Hi,

I just wanted to share a little frustration. I am not sure whether it is born out of me using the tools incorrectly, or the tools not providing everything I need. Let me explain....

I started out using Premiere Pro, and it was great. Simple and easy. I then got hold of After Effects. It was a great addition. I done my editing in Premiere and fx in AE. It worked well, and my understanding of both programs has grown....

However the way that I now use the programs has changed dramatically. All I use Premiere for now is capturing the DV material, and I do all editing, effects, color correcting, etc., in AE. Somehow my intuition tells me that is not right but it's the most flexible and productive environment? It's not like the material I produce is full of effects, but the flexibility of the software is great.

The only thing that AE is missing is decent audio editing like Premiere.

Has anyone else travelled the same path or am I all alone??

Secondly, are there any other NLE's out there that have great Audio capabilities like Premiere (ie. VST plugin support etc.) + excellent effects with great support for a wide range of plugin's?

Thanks

Robert

Cheers

Robert

[Christopher Lefchik]

Robert,

My workflow is to do all my editing and color correction in Premiere Pro. If there is a section in my project that needs the After Effects touch, then I import my project (or just the individual Premiere Pro sequence from the project) into After Effects. Because After Effects understands Premiere Pro projects, all edits, clips and sequences are imported.

Personally, I find editing in After Effects clunky and inefficient. It's just not set up to do that type of work. The workspace and tools are meant for effects.

You are aware of After Effect's capability to import Premiere Pro projects, aren't you? It makes things so much easier. All editing can be done in Premiere, and then the project can be imported into After Effects with the edits preserved. With the most current versions of Premiere Pro (1.5) and After Effects (6.5), clips can be pasted back and forth between the applications while they are both running at the same time.

Premiere Pro can do a decent job at audio editing, though the video editor with the best audio capabilities is Sony Pictures Vegas. From what I hear it's effects capabilities are pretty good, though I don't know how many third-party video plug-ins there are for Vegas.

[Xander Christ]

This may sound really weird, but what exactly are you trying to do in After Effects that you can't do in Premiere Pro?? I've actually been tooling around with dumping AE plug-ins into Premiere Pro and using it all within Premiere Pro. Most plug-ins seem to work albeit some don't give you same interface in Premiere Pro as they have in After Effects. I use AE almost exclusively for advanced compositing, everything else from titles, keying and color correction is now done in Premiere Pro. I've dramatically cleaned up my workflow.

[Steven Gotz]

I generally make color corrections and other such things to the entire clip in AE then use it in Premiere Pro. Or, I may chop it up in Premiere Pro and then export to a DV AVI and use it in AE to do what I need to do. With straight cuts there is no loss making the AVI.

I do titles in AE and serious motion, and 3D using Zaxwerks.

But most of the true editing is done in Premiere Pro.

[Robert Double]

Thanks everyone for there comments. Here is an attempt to answer some of the questions...

What do I use AE for? Well I use it for the following :

1. Magic bullet de-interlacing & de-artifacting
2. Color Correction
3. Doing "advanced" transisitions one example is the effect of panning the camera very quickly horizontally producing heavy motion blur transitioning into the next frame.. or using "blending" modes...
4. Compositing and effects

I know you can do 2 in Premiere, but there is no Magic Bullet for premiere (unless what Xander suggests works ie. I use the AE effect in premiere), and also doing advanced transitions... it just feels easier in AE.

You can be a lot more fluid in your design with AE. You don't have to export your AVI from Premiere, edit in AE, import back to Premiere, only to find out you want a transition or effect to be at different point in time. You have to go through the whole process again which is very time consuming. AE allows you to be more dynamic and to experiment.

I think maybe I have spent a bit too much time on AE, so maybe have neglected what Premiere can do for me. I was hoping that there was some software out there like Premiere, but more advanced in the effects arena.. ie. has a AE + Premiere in a single UI.

On a slightly different subject, How would people approach the following project:

1. You capture 20 minutes of footage
2. You need to make a 5 minute film
3. It needs to be de-interlaced using Magic Bullet in AE
4. It needs to be color corrected
5. It needs to to have several "advanced" transitional effects in the film.
6. It has a musical score & sound fx

Based on those requirements what is the most efficient way to approach it using Premiere and AE? An example of how I am thinking of doing it...

1. De-Interlace & de-artiefact all 20 minutes footage in AE
2. Make a rough-cut in Premiere using footage
3. Color correct footage in premiere
4. make a rough cut of the musical score and sound fx in premiere
6. Refine footage in premiere and apply premiere transitions
7. Work out "advanced" transitions and export from premiere to AE
8. Work out special fx and export from premiere to AE
9. Finalise soundtrack
10. Pull together final composition in Premiere

That is how I am going to approach a current project I am about to work on. However, step 1 is a LONG task, and will take a huge amount of disk space as I prefer to render out of AE in a uncompressed format to ensure no loss of quality. I thought about doing the rough-cut in interlaced first, and then de-interlacing... but during steps 1-4 the composition can be fairly fluid, ie changing clips, order etc..... And it is better to apply color correction on the de-artifacted clip. So to save time in the future, I thought it was a good idea to de-interlaces and de-artifact first.

I hope I haven't confused too many people..... Being relatively new, it is interesting to hear how people approach projects and use the tools....

Cheers

Robert

[Christopher Lefchik]

Robert,

There is a version of Magic Bullet for Premiere Pro. In fact a light version is available for free. See http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/premiereprosupport.html. The full version is here: http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/mbforeditors.html.

[Robert Double]

Hi Christopher,

You are correct, there is a version of Magic Bullet for Premiere but it only contains the Look component, and this called Magic Bullet Editors. For the version that include de-interlacing, and de-artifacting you have to use Magic Bullet Suite and that is only available on AE. Have a look at http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/magicbulletfamily.html

Robert

[Christopher Lefchik]

Robert,

I see. I never used Magic Bullet so I didn't know the difference between the versions.

[Pete Bauer]

Xander,

Although I agree with the previous comments that editing in AE would be clunky, it seems you've at least partially answered your own question. AE does a lot of stuff better than PPro (better keying, even the garbage mattes are far more sophisticated, easier and faster to use), and a lot of stuff that PPro can't (motion tracking, complex cloning, 3D compositing, 16bit color support, to name a few). That's not even mentioning the 3rd party add-ins and apps that come with the Video Collection bundle. PPro and AE are a matched set. Actually, I regularly use ALL of the Adobe apps in the Video Collection Pro. Some folks could do fine with just PPro, others couldn't. Just depends on what a person needs.

[Xander Christ]

I did indicate that my response was weird. :)

For the deinterlacer, I purchased Re:VisionFX's Fields Kit for Premiere Pro which takes as freakin' long to render as MB and I feel the quality is the same (I haven't tried to convert 60i to 24p using MB in Premiere). The deartifact option in MB is interesting, but I've gotten pretty good keys without "deartifacting" dv footage and using Premiere Pro's built-in keyer. For more advanced stuff, I took AE's Keylight plug-in and dumped it into PP's plug-in folder and viola, I got Keylight in Premiere. So, I just accomplished two tasks without having to go into AE.

I agree that Premiere Pro can't do advanced motion tracking and blurring and all that jazz, but that's what I was getting at. If you don't need motion tracking (and the jazz too), you really don't need to switch environments just to deinterlace and color correct. Premiere's got most of AE built into it now (I think of PP 1.5 as "AE Lite"). I still use AEPro for all the advanced and complicated motion graphics, but for the editing stuff, I use PP since that's what it was designed for. I just didn't fully understand what Robert was specifically trying to accomplish.

[Christopher Lefchik]

it is better to apply color correction on the de-artifacted clip.

Have you tried applying Magic Bullet as the first effect on a clip, then the color correction effect? After Effects will apply the Magic Bullet effect first, then the color correction, so you will be effectively applying the color correction on the de-artifacted clip. That way you won't have to go through the time consuming process of first rendering all your footage out of After Effects with Magic Bullet. You could do all your AE work last, and apply Magic Bullet to the five minutes of footage you actually use, instead of all twenty minutes of raw footage.