After Effects Direct Link clips render slow in Premiere

[Dustin Parsons]

I may have just discovered what’s contributing to this: In AE when I’m exporting my RAM is being utilized a lot but in PPro my CPU is maxing itself out while not using as much RAM. Hmmm…

[Dustin Parsons]

Thinking about this some more… I remember reading that I shouldn’t use my render files when exporting (despite having the option to) because their quality won’t be as high as when opting to render everything on export. This, it seems, would make Direct Link even less useful since every new version of a cut would require rerendering even if a clip was not changed for the new version. Is my thinking correct here?

Ok, last post to myself – I’m starting to feel like Dr. Maclolm, “See, here I’m now sitting by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory.”

[Alex Udell]

Hey Dustin…

I don’t think anyone ever stated that dynamic link would be faster for rendering.

The point of dynamic link is that it allows you to build effects soft linked or really dynamically linked…meaning that the iterative process between how individual shots are comp’d and how they work in the context of an edit let you see the big picture in a connected way that promotes easy access to fx iteration. So there is a productivity benefit.

I’d suggest, as I often do….

1) making sure your comps are full global performance cached in AE if you have the disk space for it.
or
2) Set Proxies in AE. Full Res if your looking for final output quality thru PPro or low res if you just want to see how things work in ppro. This will allow a couple of things…1- motion blur to be included in your dynamic linked comps…2- faster rendering in PPro…because the dynamic link clip will see thru to AE which is already pointing at a Flat file via the proxy. (but still maintain the editability of the AE comp should you need it by disabling a proxy)….and proxies can be batched pretty easily in AE as well.

so i hope that helps….

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Daniel Peterson]

Hey Alex, just reading this thread because I would love to speed things up in my workflow if possible… proxies sound very interesting, I’ve never really used them, but a few comps I’m working on now are really slowing down my system and I’m wondering if proxies would help a lot (I know there is a lot of factors to consider, but proxies is one I haven’t tried yet), any links/tutorials you know of that are worth going through?

Filmmaker | Motion Graphic Artist
http://www.TheDigitalSlice.com (beta) – A NLE survey.
http://www.SaltMedia.net

[Alex Udell]

It’s not hard…

just select the comp in the project panel in AE.

File > Create Proxy.

Once it’s rendered….it will be SET as the proxy for the comp. you will see a gray box (button) next to it in the comp panel. if the button is filled…then the comp is pointing at the render. it it’s not…then the comp is live again (meaning you can further refine the comp).

That’s it.

Ppro dynamic link still has to look thru to AE, but if AE is seeing a proxy as opposed to all the live layers…it should update in PPro much quicker.

hope that helps!

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Dustin Parsons]

Thanks Alex! The proxies work pretty well while building the project, definitely helps prevent stuttering playback.

What do you like to do though for the final export? Do you export the direct linked clips from AE and bring them into PPro or do you just let PPro render the direct linked clips on export? I guess this goes back to my original question about why it takes PPro longer than AE to render the clips and if it’s possible to make PPro utilize more RAM on export than CPU (as AE does)? No worries if you don’t have the answer, this is probably a question more suited for an employee at Adobe.

[Alex Udell]

Hi Dustin…

glad you are seeing some benefit…
I can’t answer the low level tech stuff on RAM or why the differential in time…

For final out…

I had a couple of really good discussions about this here on the Cow…

1) You can rebatch your proxies in AE at full res final quality. Then just export from PPro. For archive purposes though, you need to remember to manage AE project(s) and PPro. And this really means 2 sets of renders: 1 for FX and 1 for PPro.

2) Walter Soyka pointed out to me that he prefers to really not use dynamic link at all and he makes sure to enable project linking in AE when he exports the clips he cuts back into the PPro timeline. This gives you a flat piece of media that u can use in PPro that can media managed by PPro for archive and certainly shouldn’t slow down export. And if you need to re-open the AE project it’s just a right click away. So that’s a good one too. But in my mind you’d still need to do collects for AE anyway for archive.

hope that helps…

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX