After Effect & Media Composer 3

[David Bogie]

I’ve never used Avid.

You send him/her uncompressed clips, Animation is the universal exchange codec. If you use an Avid codec, your AE artist may not be able open the lcips or encode back to the same format. Animation creates huge files because they’re lossless and the codec carries an alpha channel.

Before you jump into anything, wait around here for a couple of hours for someone else to offer better advice. Round tripping to AE is standard procedure for may Avid editors, you might find a simple and precise solution it he Avid forum. If you are corssposting, please go back and close all of your threads with your solution.

bogiesan

[Kevin Camp]

as far as getting footage to the compositor, i prefer lossless animation quicktime files, but you should ask the compositor what he preferes. just make sure that when you export you are exproting the full frame size and frame rate. i also prefer avid to do the color conversion from 601 color space to rgb at export, but taqlk to the compositor about that too.

for getting files to avid, i’ve found that rendering from ae to the avid meridien uncomopressed (1:1) codec seems to work the best. it takes the guess work out importing into avid.

i have also used apple’s lossless animation codec, which imports fine into avid, but there are settings that you need to set at import for pixel aspect ratio (square or 601), color space (rgb or 601), alpha channel (ignor, use, or invert) and fields (odd, even, none). the avid meridien codec includes all that info, plus if you transfer the file directly to your media drive, you should save some import time by avoiding convertion of the .mov.

on the ae side, the only things you have to do to render to avid meridien is download and install the free codec from avid, and work with a 601 standard comp size and frame rate… the codec will only render 601 standards.

however, since the codec is only 601, if you are working in hd, you might want to use the lossless animation codec, just get the specifics down for import. you can specify field order (or progressive) but if the files have an alpha channel, you’ll always choose invert alpha at import. talk to the compositor about color space and pixel aspect. personally, i’d prefer to render to rgb color space and square pixel aspect ratio and let avid handle the conversion, but he may prefer to work a different way.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW