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Getting things into AE correctly
Hi all,
I’m an Avid editor but have been given an FCP 5D project for quick turn-over and need a little guidance for exporting to AE and re-importing back to FCP the best way possible.
Normally I would ingest my 5D footage into Avid and it would transcode everything for me into DNxHD 145 files, so logically when I use this workflow to export to AE (to work on signatures/logos and color correction), I would export a video mixdown from Avid as is (DNxHD 145), import that into AE and re-export as is. No loss whatsoever.
Now I’m looking at what the other editor has handed me, and I find it odd that the footage is listed as being H.264 files…
Maybe it’s just me and I’m really not that familiar working with FCP, but shouldn’t he have converted the footage to ProRes first?
No titles were added in the sequence, just a couple of transition effects.I’d just like to figure out what the best route would be from here on, to get things into AE without much loss of quality and without losing too much time converting things, and back into FCP eventually to wrap things up.
This project is a commercial for web content viewing only.
Thanks in advance.
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9 Replies
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Bummer, Ray. You kind of got a bum deal out of this one as FCP doesn’t handle h264 very well.
Yes, you should transcode first, but that will cause some problems too as there’s no tc/reel info to relink the transcoded footage to your h264 footage.
Do you have access to the original card structure or do you only have the h264 files?
Jeremy
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If you have to send the full sequence to AE, change your sequence codec to Prores (or better to 8b Uncompressed) and export. If there are effects or motion effects in your sequence and you decide go Prores, set render in High Precision.
Rafael -
You could look at https://www.popcornisland.com/2009/03/final-cut-2-after-effects/ which is a script to take fcp sequences to ae. NOTE for some reason my antivirus flags this as dicey … I am pretty sure that it isn’t.
Matt. -
That’s what I was afraid of – that there was no proper way to relink the transcodes after the fact. Thanks for confirming (and good to know for future collaborations!).
And no, unfortunately I do not have access to the original card to re-do a batch capture – I’m pretty much stuck with the h.264 files.
So my only option right now is to follow what Rafael said: change my sequence compressor settings to ProRes and export the full sequence to AE?
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[Ray Herman] “So my only option right now is to follow what Rafael said: change my sequence compressor settings to ProRes and export the full sequence to AE?”
No, not necessarily. Check out Grinder. It will transcode the files for you, but you will still have to manually relink, reedit. I’d do this now before going too much farther down the road. In the long run, it will make the edit process easier.
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-grinder/
Jeremy
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Next time you can use that Grinder, and also the PopCornisland Script. That work well to send stuff to AE, but I’m not sure will work with original HDSRL files because they have no TC.
Rafael -
Interesting, Thanks for the link!
Well I don’t know if this is standard FCP procedure or not, but I went ahead and transcoded all my footage into ProRes in Compressor, and relinked the media files manually in FCP and everything seemed pretty flawless and hassle-free! Even though the media files are simply links in FCP (as opposed to Avid), the relinking process still managed to remember and locate the specific in and out points in the previous version.
I changed my sequence to ProRes to match my newly reconnected media files, and all looks good… But is it really?
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[Ray Herman] “I changed my sequence to ProRes to match my newly reconnected media files, and all looks good… But is it really?”
Yeah, you’re all good. Compressor, grinder, log and transfer, it’s all transcoding the ha64 files to ProRes, and then you relink the browser to the new transcoded files. You had to do this backwards, meaning the edit started and then you transcoded. If your propject doens’t have a lot of media, this process can go fairly quickly, if you have a more complex project, that process can be daunting. Ideally, you would transcode first, then edit.
What you did is totally fine.
Now, if you need to get your edited timeline to AE, there’s automatic duck, or this popcorn island thing. I have autoduck and it works really well, I have never tried popcorn. https://www.automaticduck.com
Also, if you have the Adobe creative suite (CS4 and above), you can export an XML to Premiere, then Dynamic link to AE from there.
BorisFX also has a plugin to do this: https://www.borisfx.com/XML-Transfer/
As always with FCP, there’s many ways to do the same thing.
Jeremy
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Excellent. Thanks for all your help, guys.
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