After Effects integration with FCP

[Mckooken]

Thanks for the help. I managed to import the referenced FCP Clip into After Effects.

Would you need automatic duck to take your composited AE clip and bring it back into
Final Cut Pro for further editing? I’m feeling pretty dumb about now. Basically now that
I imported the Referenced FCP Clip, screwed around with it in AE, what’s the best way to
go back into FCP with the AE changes? It’s kindof amazing that Apple doesn’t integrate
better with AE, since it’s such a standard.

Thanks again.

[Jason Connolly]

Hey there-

Yes, I too would love closer intergration between FCP and AE, but Dave’s point about competition is well documented. Also, Dave’s right about Automatuc Duck — fantastic products, but expensive. Purchasing the Duck only makes sense if you are constantly flipping btw AE and FCP, or AVID, etc. Personally, I do it all day long, so I convinced my boss last year to pony up the dough, and have been very happy with the Duck (although their registration and activation process leaves something to be desired. Kind of a hassle).

Anyway, to get your clip back to FCP, you’ll need to render out the clip as a movie(command-M), just like if you were rendering an effect in FCP. The AE manual comes with a lengthy chapter on rendering, so it may be worth your while to check it out.

Some advice:
Render out at the highest quality possible(Uncompressed, Lossless, Animation), even if that means rendering out with a different codec than your native FCP codec. For example, if your FCP project is a DV project, DO NOT render your AE clip with the NTSC/DV codec. Sure, you’ll be able to play back the DV in real time in your FCP timeline, but you WILL lose detail. Render in AE with highest quality, and let FCP convert to DV.

I could be wrong, but that’s always worked best for me. Just my two cents…

Cheers!
Jason

[Zander]

very much agreed, youll have to render twice, and it sucks, but it looks the best, by far, one thing to watch out for, and i recomend doing it, bring in your audio to a.e. and render out (ive had several problems that cost me about 8 hours the day before a deadline, inwhich the audio was playing at 29.97fpsin fcp while the footage was 30(mind you i rendered out at 2997…over ten min, its off…way off

i think it’s a 1 time thing but i dont trust it

its a pain, im sorry, until motion is flunked and premear is dumped as well, there won’t be a cross ap protical

Aaron Zander-Student edditor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2

[Steve Roberts]

Hmm … if my FCP timeline were DV, and I didn’t plan on doing any effects rendering within FCP, I’d use AE to render straight to the DV codec then drop that movie into FCP. It’s common practice to render to the sequence’s codec if little to no effects rendering is expected in the NLE.

I don’t see any advantage to forcing FCP to re-encode the Animation movie to the DV codec in that situation. The only reason to let FCP do the encoding in that situation would be if FCP encoded DV better than AE did, but I just don’t see that happening.

my 2 cents,
Steve

[Jerry Witt]

I agree with the above post. I ALWAYS render to the frame size, frame rate and codec of the exported media. I also DON’T render the audio. I bring it back into FCP, duplicate the sequence that I exported and put my rendered file on a new layer on top of the original. It lines up perfectly and then I don’t have to do a second render (and waste all that disk space).

[Wes Plate]

Time was when Apple might have included an “export to AE” feature for FCP

They did?

— Wes Plate
Automatic Duck

[Zander]

time was, back befor apple got all high and mighty, and said “hey adobe can do it, so can we” it might have been in the works, might not have, but apple use to integrate with adobe alot, and bring it in

it never happened, probably never will, but i can dream

Aaron Zander-Student edditor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2

[Jason Connolly]

Hey, Gang-
My apologies, I didn’t mean to push the thread off of the poster’s question…Of course, yes, render to frame size and frame rate. My experience has been that when I render in AE to DV, sharp, thin lines get a teensy bit blurred, but if I render uncompressed in AE, and then let FCP perform the DV render, I get a little sharper results. Maybe it’s something that’s quirky about my system, or the way my AE renders out to DV, but it’s worked for me in the past. Apologies if I’ve confused the matter.

Thanks,
Jason

[Steve Roberts]

[Jason Connolly] “My experience has been that when I render in AE to DV, sharp, thin lines get a teensy bit blurred, but if I render uncompressed in AE, and then let FCP perform the DV render, I get a little sharper results.”

Well then, there’s a good reason to do it. 🙂

… as long as those sharp thin lines don’t create issues on interlaced monitors, that is.

[David Eells]

My two cents –

I’m doing motion graphics work for a film that’s being done in FCP, and I’ve been running export tests. I’m finding that exporting from AE to DV codec gives a noticeably degraded result versus rendering to Animation and letting FCP render in the timeline. Don’t know why, don’t think it’s right, but I’m getting fairly consistent results.