Creating lower thirds in AE for editing in Premiere Pro.

[Joseph W. bourke]

I generally create my template design in Photoshop, which gives me the bars, lines, boxes, text (for position only), and whatever other non-animating elements I need, import the .psd as layers into After Effects, create the looping elements I need, and then output a looped, blank, animating lower third either as a Quicktime Animation (millions of colors plus – to give me an alpha channel). From there I import the animated looping blank into Premiere Pro and create the final text, based on my “for position only” text in Premiere.

I also use this same approach when creating graphics packages to send out to clients who may be doing the editing on their end. In that case, I also create all of the text for the various lower thirds as a separate .png file, and send that along to them. It saves creating a separate, looping lower third animation for every graphic, and enables quick additions in case the client forgot a name.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Kris Merkel]

I use the same workflow as Joseph most of the time but sending the file to PrPro using Dynamic link works just as well and then all of the L3 elements are continually editable.

Create your L3 master in AE and then duplicate it for each L3 you need, then you can use DL to send each one to PrPro. If you need to edit the individual L3 right click and edit in AE. This way you can see your updates instantly when you return to PrPro without the need to render out each one first.

Just make sure before you do you final encode from ProPro to set all the AE layers to max quality and the comp resolution to full otherwise PrPro will use the AE settings for render.

“Think of everything in terms of building capacity.”

Kris Merkel
twitter: @kris_merkel
Product Manager, Flanders Scientific Inc.
http://www.shopfsi.com
Co-Founder, Atlanta Cutters Post Production User Group
http://www.atlantacutters.com

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