FCP to AE

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Hi
I'm just finishing the edit of my HDV 720/25p *.m2t footage on FCP 6 and will be importing the timeline to After Effects (Cuts only). There is a fair bit of compositing and animation work in After Effects, and I'll probably finish in uncompressed HD (QT) and a TIFF Sequence.

I just wanted to know, once I import the timeline into After Effects, do I render out uncompressed first, reimport it back to AE and then continue work in AE? Because if I work directly of the imported timeline, am I not working with the compressed HDV files?

Output is DVD and filmout. Thanks,

[Dean Sensui]

If you aren't already using it, get Automatic Duck. A huge help when it comes to moving a sequence into an AE project.

As for rendering out, don't bother. You're not gaining anything and just burning valuable time. AE will take care of tonal recalculations internally.

Go ahead and do your compositing and other work, then render out to whatever format you'll need to do your filmout.

FYI, if you're doing greenscreen or roto, you might want to consider shooting in 1080p. More pixels. More accuracy.

[Aric Mannion]

If I understand what you are asking you want to "export quicktime" (not conversion which will compress it) from final cut, and make either a reference file or self contained. This will not recompress your timeline (unless you tell it to). It will give you the exact same quality, so you want to make sure your timeline quality is high.
That's not usually my work flow for green screen projects, but I'm not sure what your are doing.

Edit: I never heard of automatic duck though, but this is still a quick way that does not compress your video.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Originally Posted by Aric Mannion

If I understand what you are asking you want to "export quicktime" (not conversion which will compress it) from final cut, and make either a reference file or self contained. This will not recompress your timeline (unless you tell it to). It will give you the exact same quality, so you want to make sure your timeline quality is high.
That's not usually my work flow for green screen projects, but I'm not sure what your are doing.

Edit: I never heard of automatic duck though, but this is still a quick way that does not compress your video.

Since I've shot in 720p on a JVC 111E Camera, I can't get better than HDV *.m2t. I captured this using FCP6, and it converted the whole thing to a *.mov file. Apple says it doesn't do anything to the footage, but it is still transcoding.

I have edited this footage (cuts only) in FCP and I want to finish in AE in 32 bit color (or 16 bit if my machine can't manage 32 bit). There's compositing work (green screen and otherwise), and maybe a lot of color grading. This is why I want to finish it in AE in Uncompressed HD - either QT uncompressed HD or as a TIFF Sequence. However, while exporting the timeline (it's a feature film) from FCP to AE, either via Automatic Duck or XML, AE still 'gets to play with' only the HDV files that are captured, right? It can't use the 32 bit color on this as there's no point then in just rendering out to Uncompressed HD for my master. I'm working with uncompressed so I can use effects in it and not lose a lot of quality. So my question was, do I import the timeline to AE, convert it to a 32-bit file and then render out to Uncompressed HD (TIFF Sequence having preference over QT Uncompressed)?

Once I do this, I'll reimport this file back into AE and begin my effects work. Thanks!