• Adobe After Effects

  What to export with from premiere, to do grading in AFX?

  Posted by Daniel Martinez on September 16, 2005 at 4:44 am

  Hi,

  I shot a short on DVCAM. The film set was profesionaly lit so the material is pretty good and the colours nicely represented.

  Now I edited the movie in Adobe Premiere Pro, and I captured the material in DV-PAL.
  I think I’m going to grade the movie in Adobe AfterFX with color finesse, and I know I can open the premiere project within afterFX
  thus keeping the material untouched.

  But then what? Will the grading be done with the DV 4:1:0 colorsampling?
  Wouldn’t it be better to export the entire movie from premiere to a 10bit stream and THEN do the grading?

  What if I choose to take my grading to another platform and I need to export the movie from premiere anyhow?
  Should the frames be recompressed or left at the same data rate?

  When I export a DV captured clip with a DV codec for post, I always get nervous. I’m not really at ease with the situation, and I therefor choose to export it in 10bit. And keep it there for the rest of the proces. But am I just wasting good bits and harddisk space?

  Daniel

  Steve Roberts replied 20 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Steve Roberts

  September 16, 2005 at 7:26 am

  [r303] “But am I just wasting good bits and harddisk space?”

  Yep. You can’t add colors that weren’t on tape when you shot.

  However, if you expect to alter the footage in post by re-rendering and recompressing as you add effects, you should re-render to the Animation codec or Microcosm codec beforehand. Those codecs don’t improve the footage, they just “freeze” the quality at its original level, allowing for recompression down the line without degradation.

  You would work in 16-bit-per-channel and render to 10-bpc if you have subtle gradients and expected to alter the footage using effects that would crunch those gradients further through rounding and such, creating banding. Sometimes using Hue/Sat can crunch, so it’s likely that most grading procedures would do that as well. However … what would you do with your nice 10-bpc render? Unless you’re going to Digibeta, you have to bring it down to 8-bpc again for your output, I’d wager. Now, it’s possible that bringing it down (and risking banding) later is better than crunching it sooner, but I’d have to test the pipeline for the best effect.

  Basically, Animation/Microcosm and 10-bit would preserve your original DVCAM quality, but 10-bpc might not be necessary, depending on the amount of smooth gradients in your footage.

  Microcosm is available from Digital Anarchy, and it supports 16-bpc.

  my 2 cents,
  Steve

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