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Your workflow
I am trying to speed up my work.
Too often I can fall into a bad habit of using AE as my video editor and that’s just crazy, considering the render times.
I am trying to bump up my Final Cut skills and am rethinking a more efficient workflow. As I am doing so I can see how much faster a RT enviro can be when you know all the shortcuts.
I have seen the Duck plug-in but I’m not sure how much I would use it. I don’t want to drop $500 w/out really thinking about that.
I guess I post this to ask how other pros here set up your workflow?
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7 Replies
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FCP is definitely your best bet for editing – it’s the shizzle. Editing in AE will only bring you sorrow and heartache.
As far as automatic duck goes, if you’re sending large parts of your edits to AE and still need some degree of control over them (I do lots of long greenscreen interviews with edits the often need rolling around for example), then it will really, really help you out workflow-wise.
There is a little script here that does a similar thing, but not with so many features. Give it a go…
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It depends on the piece.
If it’s longer than thirty seconds or a minute, involving title sections and content sections, I prefer to render the sections in AE then assemble with transitions in FCP. The advantage of this workflow becomes apparent when you’re doing revisions and you’re on deadline: you just render a patch (of the revision) then drop it into the FCP timeline. Then you’d re-export the entire piece from FCP (current settings), which is much faster than re-rendering the entire thing in AE.
If it’s shorter than that, I’ll usually do the whole thing in AE.
Now if it’s heavy with live footage, and AE is only needed for one clip, I’ll cut in FCP then export the one clip for work in AE, then render from AE and re-import into FCP.
If it’s in-between, I might use the Duck, but I’ve only needed it for one project so far. Your mileage may vary, since as I said, it depends on the project.
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Nico, I’ll try that out.
Years ago I used Premiere a lot but then I had about a 5 year hiatus from using any video editor. (I was doing a lot of Flash work).
Now I realize that to work more efficiently in AE I MUST couple it with renewed skills with a video editing app.
I am just tying to sort out…do I build placeholders in FCP and use that as my final authoring environment…do I make AE my finishing app after I’ve taken everything as far as I can in FCP?
My work is very compositing-centric. Sometimes I have zero video footage. Still the time-hit of constantly re-rendering gets crazy.
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Steve, I do keep my work in chunks because yes, complete renders get crazy.
I am going to have to explore…I wish you could bring in entire AE projects in FCP in the same way you can bring in Motion or LiveType projects.
I crave something more seamless.
I sure wish AE was better at transferring RAM caches into saved render chunks.
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Craig,
Might be a bit controversial…but have you considered going back to Premiere? It really couldn’t be more seamless between AE and PPro (since CS2 version at least) because you have dynamic link and don’t have to render your AE comps – just drop them into your timeline and it links you back to the comp in AE for tweaking.
I’ve not used FCP much, but I am told there is negligible difference between FCP and PPro these days..it’s worth a look, especially as you haven’t really started getting your head around FCP yet. You can transfer over any keyboard shortcuts to Prem though. If you work mainly in AE it makes sense to me.
On the AE annoying re-renders side..Nucleo Pro 2 is invaluable. It stores RAM cache much better than AE and of course has background/spec rendering and previewing – so you can work while it renders.
Our editor is a Quantel based system, so I have to playout AE faces & mattes via premiere, which is a pain..but if I was an editor too I’d go all Adobe I reckon.
My 2pence.
*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0 -
Craig,
Might be a bit controversial…but have you considered going back to Premiere? It really couldn’t be more seamless between AE and PPro (since CS2 version at least) because you have dynamic link and don’t have to render your AE comps – just drop them into your timeline and it links you back to the comp in AE for tweaking.
I’ve not used FCP much, but I am told there is negligible difference between FCP and PPro these days..it’s worth a look, especially as you haven’t really started getting your head around FCP yet. You can transfer over any keyboard shortcuts to Prem though. If you work mainly in AE it makes sense to me.
On the AE annoying re-renders side..Nucleo Pro 2 is invaluable. It stores RAM cache much better than AE and of course has background/spec rendering and previewing – so you can work while it renders.
Our editor is a Quantel based system, so I have to playout AE faces & mattes via premiere, which is a pain..but if I was an editor too I’d go all Adobe I reckon.
My 2pence.
*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0 -
Yes. I hear that Premiere and AE are best buddies now, and the cross-app interaction is worth looking into.
I don’t know any details, though.
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