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After Effects to Flame finishing workflow
Hi, I’m a commercial editor and I use after effects heavily for compositing rough cuts. My After Effects composites are rarely used for final picture, but often rebuilt by the Flame artists. Traditionally, my workflow has involved applying the Timecode effect to my compositions, rendering with timecode, and importing them back into Avid. Then basically I roughly rebuild the whole thing in order to make an AAF/edl for the Flame team. Obviously this is very tedious and time consuming and I’m about to finish five 30second spots that are primarily comprised of AE comps. Wondering if anyone has a better way of prepping for finish… I recently learned Premiere and wonder if it could be helpful in this process? Any suggestions are most welcome!
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4 Replies
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You should talk to your Flame artists — a lot of what they’d most like to see coming from you could be really workflow-dependent.
I don’t know how rough your rough comps are, but you might be able to do a lot of that work directly in Premiere, then export XML. Adobe’s XML can be wonky, though; they don’t always conform as well as you’d expect. The cleaner your timeline is the better, but even so, a lot of people wash Premiere’s XML output with Resolve before re-conforming in Flame.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Hi, Walter. Thanks for your reply.
I’ve just gone freelance after years of having a dedicated assistant and I’m finding I’m doing a lot more of the session prep than I did with an assistant, so there are some foreign concepts to me…
I am unfamiliar with XML— I will play with it, but can you briefly explain to me what’s different about an XML from an AAF? Also, when you say “wash” the XML in Resolve, do you mean then convert the XML to AAF in Resolve after making sure everything is in order in Resolve?
Thanks again for your time! -
I do rough cuts of my graphics in premiere all the time. I used to use AE for that like you say you are, but since CC premiere is so awesome and easy to use I don’t bother cutting timelines in AE any more.
I co-worker of mine managed to get a premiere timeline into Avid recently so I definitely know that is possible. I imagine the workflow from Premiere to Flame is going to be a lot more supported than from AE to Flame. Premiere has far better options for exporting: AAF, XML, etc. After Effects really isn’t built for this. And in premiere you can bake in timecode and clip names virtually automatically, which I just used on a project where I pre-edited my graphics for someone who was finishing in Avid.
However I realize you probably already have timelines built in AE that you would like to send over. The cool thing is that you can just import those directly into Premiere and then export to Flame – I think that’s going to be your best bet.
– Spencer
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This is great, Spencer. Thanks so much for taking the time.
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