Chapter Three. Using Premiere Pro and After Effects Together

If you're unfamiliar with After Effects, you should know that the program is a gold mine of content, particularly motion backgrounds and text effects. In addition, for many key functions, including chroma key, variable slow motion, color correction, and scaling, After Effects has more features than Premiere Pro and produces much higher output quality.

Most importantly, you should know that you don't really need to master After Effects to retrieve these gold nuggets. Understand a few simple concepts about how the program works, and you can use it to quickly and easily improve the quality and variety of your videos and DVDs. This chapter starts with these concepts.

Then you'll learn the integration option available between After Effects and Premiere Pro to help you work more efficiently . First you'll learn alternatives for getting Premiere Pro content into After Effects, then how to get the results back into Premiere Pro.

#17 Getting Started with After Effects

You can start After Effects projects many ways, and you'll learn many of them in this book. The most straightforward way is to insert a file into After Effects, and create a new composition manually (what Premiere calls a sequence and After Effects calls a composition ). Here's how.

Working in After Effects

Working in After Effects is a lot like Premiere; generally , you apply effects or presets by dragging them from the Effects and Presets panel onto clips on the timeline and customizing the controls. The procedure for rendering is definitely different, as described in #84.

In After Effects, choose File > Import.

Select the file(s). After Effects loads them into a Project panel that looks comfortingly like Premiere Pro's ( Figure 17a ). In the figure, I'm loading a song called "Power to Rock."

Figure 17a. After Effects' Project panel looks just like Premiere Pro's. Here's the imported file.

Drag the video file into the timeline. This creates a composition that's the same duration as the video file. You should see the file on the timeline ( Figure 17b ) and a new composition in the Project panel.

Figure 17b. Drag the video file into the timeline to create a composition of equal length. Here's After Effects in all its glory .

Creating an After Effects Project from Within Premiere Pro

If you create your After Effects project from Premiere Pro, After Effects will automatically use the correct composition settings, a nice error-prevention feature. See #20 to learn how.

Next, choose Composition > Composition Settings to open the Composition Settings window ( Figure 17c ). The Duration is 4:06:24, matching the inserted song perfectly .

Figure 17c. After Effects' Composition Settings window.

Click the Preset drop-down menu, and you'll see a number of presets.

Select a new preset, or choose the default, NTSC DV Widescreen, which is appropriate for this file.

If you're satisfied with the settings, click OK to close the dialog box. Now you're ready to start editing in After Effects.

#18 Copying and Pasting from Premiere Pro to After Effects

Adobe offers a number of ways to pass content back and forth between Premiere Pro and After Effects. First is copying and pasting content from Premiere Pro to After Effects. This works well for getting content into After Effects, but you may have some issues returning them to Premiere Pro if that's your goal.

Filter unavailable?

What should you do? Save your work as an After Effects project and import it into Premiere Pro via Dynamic Link, which is technique #20. Or render the file to DV format and import the resulting file back into Premiere Pro. Visit www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/330388.html for a complete list of items that won't copy and paste from Premiere Pro to After Effects.

For example, suppose you're editing in Premiere Pro and decide to apply a chroma key effect in After Effects. Here's how it works:

In Premiere Pro, select the clips, right-click, and choose Copy from the pop-up menu ( Figure 18a ).

Figure 18a. To copy from Premiere Pro to After Effects, select the clips, right-click, and choose Copy.

Ways to Create a New Composition

The most obvious way to create a new composition to contain pasted content is by choosing Composition > New Composition as mentioned above. Another way is to create it from within Premiere Pro as described in #20. Either way, you should choose duration carefully ; life is simpler when duration matches that of your content.

Open After Effects, and select Composition > New Composition to open a new composition.

In After Effects, click the timeline panel and choose Edit > Paste. After Effects inserts the clips into the composition at the same location as the clip in Premiere Pro ( Figure 18b ).

Figure 18b. Here are the pasted clips in an After Effects composition. Note that After Effects pasted them at the exact same timeline position as Premiere Pro.

Note

According to the current time display in both figures, the clips start at 20:01 on both timelines . This means that once you paste it back into Premiere Pro, the starting point of the chroma key clip will be exactly where you want it, at 20:01.

Saving a Premiere Pro Project from After Effects

After Effects can save compositions as Premiere Pro projects (choose File > Export > Adobe Premiere Pro Project), but if you apply effects in After Effects that aren't available in Premiere Pro, Premiere Pro can't load them. Overall, the easiest and most powerful way to share your work from After Effects into Premiere Pro is to use Dynamic Link, as described in #20.

With your clip now placed in an After Effects composition, apply the After Effects effect of your choice. For example, I use the fabulous Keylight chroma key plug-in on the green-screen clip.

Once you've applied the effect to your satisfaction, copy and paste the clip back into Premiere Pro, making sure that the current-time indicator is set at the desired insertion point.

Note

There are limitations as to the types of effects and other project elements that you can copy from Premiere Pro into After Effects. Premiere Pro won't recognize any After Effects filters that it doesn't share. There are also a number of other After Effects content types that don't paste into Premiere Pro, like text layers .

In the example described in this how-to, you'll notice that the green-screen clip reappeared in Premiere Pro totally un-chroma keyed! Click the Effect Controls tab, and you'll see the message "Offline (filter unavailable)" ( Figure 18c ) .

Figure 18c. Yikes! Premiere Pro can't import any After Effects filters it doesn't share.

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Chapter Three. Using Premiere Pro and After Effects Together