Avid to After Effects Workflow

[John Pale]

Simple answer. It won’t work. Import the stills, don’t use Avid Pan and Zoom. Don’t worry about the quality.
Replace the stills with the full res file in After Effects.

[Michael Cheung]

I agree, presumably you want to use After Effects in order to retain quality when you zoom in – which you won’t do if you use the media that Avid created when you imported into Avid.

Michael Cheung
https://filmcutter.blogspot.com

[John Hill]

Thanks, John and Michael!
Just trying to figure out the simplest round trip workflow from avid to after effects. I understand how to bring an aaf into after effects but am confused as to how to export a mxf file. Where do I export the mxf to? The desktop and then quit avid and put it into my project’s media files folder? And then start Avid again and look for it with Media tool? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of instruction on how to do it.

[John Hill]

I tried quitting Avid and putting the mxf file into the avid media files folder but Avid didn’t like that. So I’m guessing that you leave the mxf in a folder and then ama link to it…without ever putting it into the avid media files folder…unless you transcode it later…
Thanks for your help!

[Michael Cheung]

As a vfx editor I do this workflow a lot. I export a QuickTime from avid as same as source, in the case of the feature I’m on now, I export dnxhd 36. I import that into aftereffects, and comp whatever I need to comp. Then export in same codec and import into avid. Avid will fast import (essentially rewrap as mxf) because it is in avid dnxhd 36. In your case, I’d do as we suggested and import the original still into after effects, do the comp and export a QuickTime in whatever flavour of dnxhd your project is in.

Good luck!

Michael Cheung
https://filmcutter.blogspot.com