Finishing in After Effects

[Todd Kopriva]

As long as your movie exported from Final Cut Pro uses lossless encoding, you don’t have to worry about a loss in quality. People often use the Animation codec in a QuickTime container for this purpose, though the PNG codec in a QuickTime container is often even better for compression.

You can also use any of several techniques to get Final Cut Pro projects into After Effects. See this page. (I just realized that that page needs to be reorganized a bit; the FCP information is split between the top and the bottom of the page. Oops.)

You can get gamma shifts between Final Cut Pro and After Effects because of a… um… quirk with QuickTime. If you experience this problem, then follow the guidelines at the bottom of this page and this page.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Adam Beasley]

Wicked thanks a lot.

How would you suggest finishing the movie for web or dvd output in terms of sound, once I’m done in AE, as I’ve heard it isn’t too great with audio..

Ta

Adam

[Adam Beasley]

Wicked thanks a lot.

How would you suggest finishing the movie for web or dvd output in terms of sound, once I’m done in AE, as I’ve heard it isn’t too great with audio..

Ta

Adam

[Mark Hollis]

I wouldn’t.

You get infinitely more control over sound in FCP or Adobe Premiere Pro. I just did a Premiere–>After Effects–>Premiere gizmo that worked outstandingly. I had 114 layers in AE when all was said and done and simply sucked the result into Premiere Pro to do final audio tweaks.

My final output was a videotape, so I didn’t need to set it up for a DVD, but it worked great.

Render time was about 3 hours in AE. TRT was 4 minutes, 27 seconds.

Of course I’m using some old stuff, too. Premiere Pro 1.5, AE 6.5 and an old Dell XPS 600 with 4G of system RAM.

We plan an upgrade to Macs and FCP but I intend to try to keep Premiere Pro if I need to “wash” something through AE. Workflow is better with the Adobe applications until Apple comes up with something to really challenge AE.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Wes Plate]

You could spend $700, but since SRP is only $495 I’m nor sure why you would.

— Wes Plate
Automatic Duck

[Scott Novasic]

Ive been ‘finishing’ in after effects since version 1\ Cosa After Effects. Understanding compression, and lack of it, is the key. Lots and lots of storage as well. (I tend to do work that is in general always under 10 minutes in length) I like to have every effect option available to me at all times. Audio is something I take IN from an audio expert. I dont edit it in AE. My 2 cents

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Adam Beasley]

I would rather do my sound in FCP/Soundtrack..

It’s a case then of exporting back to FCP with a lossless codec but that presents the reverse of the original problem. The aepx file won’t open in FCP and if it did, it wouldn’t bring all of the effects from AE with it.

How do you maintain the quality going back the other way??

Thanks by the way peeps, this is all really helpful!

A

[Adam Beasley]

Todd,

cheers dude, exporting from FCP with the animation codec in a QT container seems to be the best way to do it. I can use XML data but the results are sketchy and differ each time, missing elements and effects and sound too, plus they seem not to want to re-size properly in AE!

This way, providing it is lossless, is much easier and although it does make new media and take a little longer it certainly does the trick every time.

Thanks.

Adam