CS4 & Dynamic Link…

[Vince Becquiot]

Honestly, Dynamic link is much more useful the other way around. When you are done editing, you export your timeline to AE and you can color correct/composite etc with individual clips. I usually render from AE to Premiere.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Cal Johnson]

Hmm.. well, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you, at least for our work flow. I find its much more useful to finish in Premiere. This way I can preview the video before its final output. Also, we do lots of audio work that sometimes gets changed at the last minute (client wants a new sound track, etc). What you’re describing I would be going from Premiere, into After Effects, and then back into Premiere again… Also, by making your final output in After Effects, you’re committing to a full render of the entire project even if there’s just one small thing that needs to be changed.

Anyhow, I didn’t want to debate the merits of workflows, I’m looking for people who are using dynamic link to bring in After Effects compositions into Premiere with CS4. Adobe touts it as a major feature of the Production Premium package. I believe that in CS3, going from Premiere to After Effects wasn’t even an option, but I could be wrong. In any case Vince, the whole point of dynamic link is to avoid rendering from After Effects to go into Premiere, as you describe. Thats a huge feature that Adobe really has emphasized, but its not working at all for me. I just wanted to know if this is a hardware issue, and I need a better graphics card or whatever, or if its just something that doesn’t quite work as well as advertised.

Again, I’m not looking to get into a debate. I’m wanting to hear from anyone who has no problem making this feature work, or who it doesn’t work for, and they feel its the software so no amount of processing power is going to change things.

It sounds like you’re not using dynamic link to bring your After Effects comps into Premiere…. why not? Because you encouter some of the same issues I described?

Cal

[Vince Becquiot]

Agreed, I didn’t mean that it wasn’t a useful option, just not as practical because of the issues you described.

You also have to look at the reality of things. You can’t see things in realtime without rendering in AE either, and that’s given the obvious complexities involved in the rendering. If you work in 3D, you will agree that the rendering time is actually pretty darn good compared to 1 frame per minute or far worse

Add to that that Premiere is just an editor, I am actually amazed that it can actually import an AE comp.

Playing the devil’s advocate here, but dynamic has come a long way from when it was first introduced, even as close as CS3

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Cal Johnson]

Vince, we’re getting into a debate that I have no interest in. I don’t “have to look at the reality of things” at all. Please take a look through Adobe’s site, and how they describe dynamic link. Please, before responding again, go take a look. They talk about how dynamic link makes so that you no longer need to render a comp out from After Effects, and then bring it into Premiere. Instead, just use dynamic link to bring the composition straight from AE to PP. Please read my first post more carefully. I’m saying this has no time saving use to me if I can’t effectively preview the composition in Premiere. I’ve tried making a sequence that is half the size, but even that needs a render preview before it can be played back. And that render preview in Premiere is taking 4x as long as it is just to render it AE and bring it in.
You seem to be saying “so what if the software doesn’t work like they say it should”. I don’t care about that. I’m interested in hearing from people who either have it working, or feel it can’t work due to the software, and so investing in a hefty computer upgrade isn’t going to change things. If you have some insight to that, I’m all ears. If not, sorry, but I’m not interested in the debate. I’m a huge fan of Adobe and their products, this is just an issue that I am trying to clarify, and I’m looking for information in that regard. Please respect my intial post and allow me to ask that question without taking the discussion totally off track.

Cal

[Vince Becquiot]

Cal,

I read your post. I’m not trying to debate, nor am I disagreeing with you, but read again.

Adobe uses very careful words, that’s called marketing.

And if you read carefully, you will see that they use the expression “eliminate intermediate rendering”, meaning in between the 2 applications, which doesn’t mean you won’t have to render in order to preview the footage.

It is faster in that you don’t have to deal with export settings, re-import, etc. You also keep layers intact, which can be a huge time saver going to AE.

It’s always been that way, and as far as I understand it, it’s the same for CS4.

Is it fair ?

Well they do offer a trial version, so I guess they can claim it is.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Cal Johnson]

Vince, please, I’m not interested in your interpretations of Adobe’s marketing strategy. I’m looking for relevant information from people using Dynamic link in CS4. I’ve asked with respectfully, and yet you keep trying to get the debate going. If you do not have any practical information, could you please leave me alone and go start your own thread or something? Man, I though the people on Creative Cow weren’t into the bravado nonsense.

I’m editing a project right now, and keep getting e-mail alerts, and its just you trying to prove some point, though what it is I don’t know. Its very annoying. I will see if I can delete this thread and start over. Would you kindly leave that one alone so I can see if someone actually has some information that will help resolve things? I’d really appreciate it. Really. Thanks for being a respectiful Cow member.

Cal

[Jon Barrie]

Hi Cal,
I don’t think you want to have a debate about the Dynamic Link feature. But by stating that it doesn’t work is fuel for a debate.

I use CS3 and CS4 and have found CS4 to absolutely use Dynamic Link way more effectively.

The new approach to sending selected media to an AE comp that has already the correct format, length and all items at the head of the comp not as far from the beginning as it was in the Premiere Pro timeline position is far faster a process than I could ever get out of CS3.

On my Core2Duo laptop I found the unrendered playback was pretty amazingly good. To render the clips was not such a big deal. The fact that I didn’t need to render out a clip and use up HDD space and only needed to render out a final project for client approval/alterations list still means I just jump in and it updates the changes in Preimere Pro instantly. Then I re-export it with the alts, no rendering from AE. That’s what the feature claims and it delivers for me exactly what I expected and a little more.

In all the responses you gave after Vince tried to explain his perspective you never mentioned your hardware. If you are running a P4 PC or an iMac then you are probably expecting too much from your hardware.

You need a Core2Duo minimum. Quad would be most beneficial. Now with the i7(Quad Core with HT for 8-Effective calculating cores) you should be laughing. The GFX card makes a difference. Then there’s the RAM amount. Are you running Vista Ultimate 64-bit? Are you running with SATA Drives in a RAID config? How far away are your computer’s specs from the recommended Adobe system setup?

You never explained the complexity of your AE comp. That’s obviously going to create a heap of lag and RAM clogging if it’s doing a lot.

If you can advise on the specs you are running we can probably give you the real world feelback you desire.

– Jon 😉

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net

[Dave Friend]

Cal,

Adobe does not state that you will get real time playback of AE comps that are dynamically linked to a Pr project. It says only that you won’t have to do in intermediate render. You don’t – but you will have to do a preview render in Pr. to see the comp in real time. (As you have seen, those often take more time than doing an intermediate render.) You will be able to instantly see the changes you make in AE update in the Pr timeline. Sure, you can SEE them – one frame at at time – but not in real time without rendering.

Your system appears to be functioning properly. It is working – just not the way you were hoping it would.

Dave

[Josh Townsend]

The only difference between CS3 and CS4 is that now you can open a premiere dynamic link in AE and there’s also a new dynamic link to Encore.

Also now you can select a single clip or sequence to export to AE (the only great feature about CS4 besides Media Browser).

Being able to open a ‘live’ premiere clip in AE might have some uses but because AE isn’t real-time it’s not like it’s some amazing new feature.

Sounds like your complaining about not being able to see an after effects comp in real time and the Premiere preview takes longer to render than it would in AE.

That’s the way it is. AE will never be real-time once you add effects so don’t think just cause you open it up in Premiere it suddenly will.

The feature works best when you don’t need to watch the AE ‘dynmalinked’ because you know your what you did is right(like doing a cc to fix a shot or feature removal).

It may not be real time but it keeps me from having to lose a single generation going between my NLE and the compositor. With out it I most likely woudn’t even edit with Premiere.

[Cal Johnson]

Ok, thanks… those responses are a little more enlightening. First, I didn’t mention my computer hardware because I’m not a computer tech. There’s not a lot of point in my posting all the specs of my systems when I already know they don’t work. What I was looking for was potentially someone to say “we have system “X” and it works just fine.

Just to clarify, a couple of times people have posted “you still have to render a preview”. Guys, thanks, I do understand that, and if you read my first post I stated that.

My whole issue is this: You can use dynamic link to bypass the intermediate render and take your clips directly from AE to PP. Sounds great. But at SD 720 x 480 resolution, the computer we had that was well within the specs recommended by Adobe couldn’t play back the dynamic link AE composition in Premiere even WITH a rendered preview. It just stuttered through, and actually screwed up the whole timeline.

We were able to render at 360 x 240, but my whole point is that it took soooooo long that it was way faster to render it out from AE, and then just bring it in. It took about 12 minutes to render a 5 second clip that was brought into Premiere via dynamic link.

The whole reason I didn’t want to get into workflow debates is because we all have different needs and preferences for how we work. Some people obviously find that having to set all the render & output settings in AE is difficult and time consuming, and therefore view Dynamic Link as a “time saver”. I myself setup preset render settings that I just recall with a couple of mouse clicks when I need them, so its not a big deal for me. However, I do at times have the client sit with me and watch the video, and ask for changes. Certainly all of the videos we do are previewed by the client for approval, and often, if not always, changes are asked for.

In this way, with Dynamic Link takiing so long to preview, its just not worth it to us as we use After Effects heavily for most of our projects, and having to wait all that extra time isn’t really an option. On one recent project I sat down at my station at 10am, and left at 11am the next morning in order to meet a deadline.

The bottom line is that if you can’t actually do even a low resolution preview without a very long wait for it to preview, then there’s not much point, at least not to me. I have to be able to see how the compositions sit in the edit, and how it all flows together, and possibly make changes. What it sounds like is the main usefulness of Adobe Link is that once the project is “locked”, you could delete all your rendered comps and just replace them with dynamic link, eliminating large files adding up on your hard drive. However, because we have to stay fluid right to up to the end, this has limited usefulness for me.

I’d also like to mention that we went from PP 2.0 to CS4, so we haven’t used CS3 as I think someone assumed.

I think I’ve got my answer, thanks for the replies. It sounds like everyone is saying, Dynamic Link will work, but yes, the time required to generate a preview in Premiere Pro will be much longer than if you just rendered it from AE and imported into the project.

Thanks again.

Cal