Creating a Title in After Effects \ Importing it to Premiere

[Steve Morris]

You need to render the title on an alpha channel. There are several different ways to do it.

PPro works best with a STRAIGHT unmatted, rather than premultiplied. The Straight setting will look bad if you view it on its own, but in PP, it will look better than premult. On somethings I can seem to get away with premult. I think it depends on what the feathering looks like on the alpha channel. I can not be for sure on this.

I use these render settings:

Quicktime
animation
Million + colors
Straight

You can use other setting like targa and tiff sequences as well.

[Darby Edelen]

[stevem1928] “On somethings I can seem to get away with premult. I think it depends on what the feathering looks like on the alpha channel. I can not be for sure on this.”

It depends on how the receiving application handles premultiplied RGB channels.

Premultiplying makes the RGB channels a solid color matte (usually black) where there is no alpha (black), mixes (multiplies) pixels in the RGB channel with the matte color where the alpha is gray, and shows an unmultiplied RGB channel where the alpha is white.

You will often experience a fringe of the solid color if you don’t interpret the alpha correctly. After Effects allows you to un-premultiply this footage on import which essentially removes the matte color from the edges of the footage (removing the fringing).

If Premiere Pro has a similar feature then you can use premultiplied footage and avoid fringing. Most programs have a way to deal with premultiplied footage.

[Steve Morris]

Is unmultiply one of those options that come in the dialog box with GUESS? I usually select guess when it comes up, because I did not know which to select.

I will go back and re-read your reply, while testing the the different options. Thanks for shedding light on this for me.

[Darby Edelen]

[stevem1928] ”
Is unmultiply one of those options that come in the dialog box with GUESS?”

Sort of. If you tell After Effects that the footage is ‘Matted with Color’ and then choose the color that the footage was premultiplied with (usually black) then AE will know that the footage is premultiplied and should automatically unpremultiply it on the fly. If this doesn’t occur or there are other factors involved then you can use effects to unpremultiply. Try Unmult from Knoll, it’s a free one but its kind of a work around.