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After Effects soundtrack made in Pro Tools? Workflow suggestions?
Hey all,
I’m making a typography video for a sermon series at my church in After Effects CS5.5. There’s a very talented composer that’s going to make a custom soundtrack but the program he uses for music is Pro Tools 9 LE.
Can I edit in Pro Tools.. within After Effects, so that when the Pro Tools project is saved, its updated in AE in real-time (maybe real-time isn’t the right word..) I understand that this can be done with Final Cut Pro, so I figured there must be a way in AE hopefully. (I’ve used Soundtrack Pro in FCP7, sending back and forth really easily, which I want to do with AE and Pro Tools)
Also any suggestions on workflow for a project like this would be greatly appreciated. Our thinking is that I’ll make the typography video stuff first with the idea of the type of music that will be used and pacing, and then make a custom soundtrack after. And then accordingly tweak the video, the audio, the graphics etc. back and forth. The files I’m animating in AE are multi-layered photoshop files if that makes any difference.
I know about exporting to an OMF file for pro tools, but not sure if that’s the best way if we want to be continually tweaking back and forth
Suggestions and advice would be greatly appreciated!
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6 Replies
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Assuming you’re not going to need to tweak the soundtrack within After Effects, your composer should just export a fully mixed track from Pro Tools (as an AIFF or WAV), which you then import into AE and use as a guide for your graphics. Any time he changes the audio track, he should just re-export, overwriting the previous audio file. Then you can simply right-click on the audio file within the project window inside AE, and select ‘Reload Footage’, and that’s it! No need for any OMFs or any of that kerfuffle.
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That sounds like it would work, but I was hoping for the option to be flipping back and forth a bit. This might not be possible.. but when I was working in FCP and Soundtrack Pro, I’d send the file to Soundtrack Pro, tweak something, hit save, and it would automatically be updated in my FCP project. That way when I made changes, I could check how it fit the video right away, adjust and check again, and so on. You can do that with FCP and Pro Tools as well.. I’m hoping you can do that with After Effects and Soundtrack Pro.
Thanks for the tip, though. If it doesn’t work the other way, this might be good.
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Your thinking of some sort of “live update” of the Pro Tools session inside AE? Nothing doing there, as far as I know. Paul’s suggestion is the way to go.
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So its vocals that will continued through the whole vid and you want to add some minor sound effects?
If not what exactly are your intentions? -
forget the tweaking back and forth….either you send him a finished video and he composes to it, or you compose the graphics to the finished music!
Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UKhttp://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk
My YouTube Animations Page -
We kind of fumbled around a bit, but I think we found a good way of doing it, for me anyway. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do, but weren’t sure about details, mostly because this is the first thing I’ve ever done in AE and I didn’t know what I could figure out by this Sunday.
I roughly put stuff together, mostly to make sure I knew how to do what we wanted, we kind of paced it out, out loud, then he made a soundtrack accordingly. He gave me the full file as well as each individual section so I can customize it. Hope it goes well.
Thanks for the advice
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