• Adobe After Effects

  Creating copies of a complicated structure and swapping in new imagery? Help!

  Posted by Margarita Drozdoff on January 6, 2006 at 9:38 pm

  Hi,

  I’m crossposting here after having asked the following in the Premiere Pro forum, because I’m thinking it might *not* be do-able in Premiere at all, but could be done in After Effects (and I just learned I have access to the latest version of AE. Yay!)

  Any comments would be much appreciated – as it could save me huge amounts of time on a rushed project. (Would even be useful to learn that it’s definitively NOT doable in one or both programs, if someone knows that to be the case.)

  So, here’s what I’ve done in Premiere, and am thinking of trying, instead in AE:

  I’ve laid down a set of clips on four tracks in the timeline. They overlap in various ways and have multiple transitions and effects applied (some of which involve the clip on one track referencing a clip on another track.)

  Ideally, I’d like to be able to copy and paste this exact structure Dozens of times, then swap in different imagery for each instance.

  I know there’s an unlink/link media option available in the Premiere project window. But that won’t work since it’ll do an across-board replacement.

  So far, it looks as though I have to recreate the whole structure each time. (I know there are “mini-shortcuts” such as setting the default transition in the project settings and copying keyframes/properties from one clip to another, but those don’t save much time in this particular situation.)

  The content in this case is all still imagery, but I’m guessing if there is some way to do this it would apply equally to stills and video clips.

  Any suggested approaches to making the work flow as efficient as possible?

  Thanks,
  Margarita

  Andrew Yoole replied 20 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Margarita Drozdoff

  January 6, 2006 at 11:41 pm

  Dave,

  Thanks. The steps you describe are exactly what I can do, and plan to do. I’m curious, do you happen to know that what I want to do is *not* possible in Premiere? (Just cause I’ve invested time in setting up the Premiere project and am more familiar with Premiere than AE.)

  If I don’t figure out analogous capabilities in Premiere (before tomorrow! :-), it sounds like it is worth my spending some number of hours figuring out how to use AE to re-create my effects. So I can then, hopefully, draft most of this project over the weekend as efficiently as possible.

  Thanks again for the answer.
  Margarita
• 

  Filip Vandueren

  January 8, 2006 at 6:19 pm

  I’ve never tried it,

  but you should be able to import that premiere project in After effects and replace footage there, using the alt-drag trick.
• 

  Andrew Yoole

  January 9, 2006 at 12:01 am

  Here’s a way I used to do a similar job within Premiere:

  Create a template project with everything set up the way you want it. Save the job and all footage items to one folder, seperate to the rest of your job. Duplicate the folder to keep as a back up. In the original folder, delete the footage files, then open the project. Premiere will ask you to locate the missing footage items. Link to your NEW footage items, save the new project with a new name, and then repeat the process for each new version. You can combine all the projects using the Import dialog if you need them to render together etc.

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