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Dynamic Link. Uh-huh!
Wake up this morning to an email from a client saying they love the cut, but could I just change this one little super? So I open Photoshop, make the change, open Media Encoder and render the sequence to a shared Dropbox folder. Done. As it should be. Thanks Adobe.
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14 Replies
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The dynmaic link in CS software really changed the game for revisions and opened the door to creativity as well.
Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
Dynamic link is awesome to a certain extent. Use it too much in a long project and it’ll bog you down. Definitely something to understand fully and have a strategy of how much to use in a longer project. I’m hoping Next helps us out a bit with this.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
[walter biscardi] “Dynamic link is awesome to a certain extent. Use it too much in a long project and it’ll bog you down.”
Absolutely! Fancy/animated lower thirds could really slow down an edit and we found it quicker to render them out on a AE workstation so that they were ProRes or DNxHD on the timeline, rather than to try to work with the Dynamically-Linked compositions on the timeline, however, the OP’s solution would would the same in this case, even though we weren’t using dynamic-link we’d update the AE render, and the file would of course be updated in the edit.
There are plenty of other cases where we’d use AE comps on the timeline, especially in the cases of needing warp-stabilizer or something similar, but in the end we used it less and less as we went along preferring pre-rendered material to speed up exporting where one minor change would see AE comps re-rendered every time even if those comps weren’t involved in the change.
As always, it’s a very nice tool to have in the chest, but I completely agree that knowing when to use it and how to use it best is key (and something we really still haven’t fully figured out in our little shop.)
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Petros, I found a workflow that avoids the boggy issue.
1. Cut in PrP
2. Select clip on TL and send to AE as DL
3. Work on comp in AE.Save.
4. Check in PrP. Render in PrP if needed to view.
5. Refine back in AE. When satisfied, I export as DNxHD making sure I check “Project Link” in the AE export queue dialog box.
6. I import into PrP and replace the DL version of the clip on the timeline with the DNxHD movie.
7. If I need to change thing, I select clip and right click. Then select “Edit Original”. Boom, the AE project opens and I make revisions.Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
Thanks Tom! That’s really helpful. I’m actually working on something now, just like this and will try it out immediately! 🙂
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Glad to help, Petros. Good luck!
Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
Hi Walter….
[walter biscardi] “Definitely something to understand fully and have a strategy of how much to use in a longer project.”
How much does the AE GLobal performance cache help with this?
Can you centralize it in a workgroup environment?
It should effectively work like a scratch disk for AE, no?
Interested to hear your thoughts on this…
thanks…
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX -
Dynamic Link is a nice way to avoid intermediate renders, and a time saver when making revisions!
AE seems to handle effects much better than PP, so I’m guessing the effects that are available to both AE and PP are best applied in AE via Dynamic Link, and rendered from PP. For example, Magic Bullet Denoiser is painfully slow with PP, so I find it easier/faster to apply it in AE and bring it back into my PP sequence. Is this the right way to go about it?
I’m curious to see how well the Maxon Cineware workflow impacts AE and PP via Dynamic Link.
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[Alex Udell] “Interested to hear your thoughts on this…”
Can’t answer those questions for you as we very rarely run Dynamic link in our environment. We do so much long form work that we essentially avoid Dynamic Link in favor Render and Replace. It’s about the same difference really.
Send a timeline to AE. Do the work, render the file.
Bring into Premiere Pro
Change the AE render later, simply render as the same name and it replaces in PPro. We generally just re-name the original file with OLD or v1 or something like that before the re-render.
Old school way of doing things, but there’s absolutely no slowdown due to any dynamic linking issues, especially when we’re working with projects of 50 – 200 hours of raw materials.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
In this case, it sounds like Paul was using dynamic link between Pr and AME — this is a bit different from a performance perspective than DL between Ae and Pr.
That said…
[Alex Udell] “How much does the AE GLobal performance cache help with this?”
Tons.
Please forgive the meme, but it seems appropriate: I don’t always use dynamic link from Ae to Pr, but when I do, I cache the working area in the background.
[Alex Udell] “Can you centralize it in a workgroup environment?”
Not in my experience. Both Ae’s global performance cache and dynamic link itself seem to be intended as a single-user, single-station solutions.
Even if you could centralize it, I wouldn’t want to. Ae’s disk cache is a black box that you can’t manage. You can’t force it to keep a specific comp in the cache; it may be automatically flushed as you continue working and the cache decides it needs space for something else.
I think Tom’s render with project link workflow is ideal for a scenario like this.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
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