For a relatively long video : Organisation tips

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Nicolas,

it all depends on the nature of the project. Could you specify the following:
1. How complex the whole edit will be?
2. Is it mainly video edit with visual assets here and there, or more heavy AE work required process?
3. Structurally, is your project has certain story parts, which could be clearly separated by meaning?

Cheers!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Hi Tomas,

In fact, there will be a set of 30 seconds to 5 minutes Ae animations (mostly 2D) that will be synchronized with a sound track.
The soundtrack is the backbone of the video. So the work is mainly concatenating the animation and adjusting the key frames to get the right synchronization with the auto.

These AE footages won’t contain much video (I mean out of a camera in real world).

The project could be divided into parts, if it is preferable for technical reasons.

Thanks for your answer !

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Nicolas, if you choose to split the project into different parts, then you will have to make sure audio is separated into individual pieces properly as well.

Anyways, I would suggest to divide the topic into more parts, just to have more convenient workflow, and not a single massive .aep project.

Later, you would render out individual pieces and connect them together, either in Premiere if its simple sequence merge, or with AE (if some more complex transition work would be required between the pieces).

To begin with, I would do the following:
1. Create a master project, which has the structure which you are familiar with (including all folders/main comps/repetitive items which might be used later (if possible to plan this),etc)
2. Inside the master, pre-comp audio file.
3. Create ‘part comps’ of the master’s audio file. Each scene will have its own audio layer cut, from master pre-comp (N overall).
4. Save as this project N times with incremental file names and then work on every individual piece animation in each .aep file.

It is as straightforward as it sounds. Based on this you can see, that it is possible to face an issue where the same assets re-use is required for other portion, yet you might not have them in the same project file ☺ There are tools which allows to simplify this, but you can always import other project into panel and leave out only whats needed.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Well, Thanks a lot Tomas, That’s clear …
I’ll be back on this page I think, to (re)-re-read your answer and apply it.

T H A N K S !

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Hi Dave, thanks for your answer,

The truth is that I don’t have much experience of audio in PP and NONE (!) in AE.

I am not sure about the way I am going to deal with the audio yet. I first thought that sound would be recorded first, and then all the animations and keyframes would be synchronized with it. Audio is master, key frames are slaves. But this last step cannot be done in PP …

I must admit … I am a bit confused. I should make tests first ! 🙂

[Nicolas Guionnet]

By the way, how do you deal with successive destructive compression that may occur when you export and import footages ?

(From Blender to Ae to PP) … do you always export in a lossless format ?

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

For such A>B>C program use cases – you should definitely go lossless (either single file or image sequences). If space is an issue, try to compare few lossless format outputs and see which generates smallest files.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

[Nicolas Guionnet] “(From Blender to Ae to PP) … do you always export in a lossless format ?”

Almost always, especially with animation.

If dealing with really long footage, I sometimes settle for 95% quality jpeg compression. But always keep the option to go lossless if it turns out (in color correction and grading) that this becomes a problem in some scene.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Nicolas Guionnet]

Thank you Kalleheikki and Tomas ( alphabetic order ),

Lossless then !