How to export sections of video into AfterEffects

[Eric Barker]

Good question with a surprisingly effective answer.

I just started doing this in the last 6 months or so, and I use it more and more. It’s especially effective because AE, while being a good precompositing program, isn’t exactly the most efficient editing environment, but thankfully, transfering between the two is a breeze.

First, setup your footage in Premiere the way you want it. Keep your organization as best as possible. I would recommend designating a video track specifically to only that footage that will be edited by after effects, just so that you have the original around in case you need it back. After you’ve placed your footage, select only the footage you’ll be using for after effets; if it’s a very short segment in a longer clip, I’d recommend slicing it up and only using a small chunk. Select Edit > Copy.

Open up a new After Effects projectand create a new composition with the same parameters as your Premiere project. Here’s the trick, hold “Ctrl + Alt” then press “V” to paste the clips directly at the play head (in this case, at the beginning of the composition). See, a normal paste (Ctrl-V) will place the clips at what their times were in Premiere, which was likely not at the beginning of the sequence, but holding down the Alt key forced AE to place the footage right at the beginning.

After that you’ll want to move the play head to the end of the clips (which will now be on separate layers if there are more than one). Click the current time indicator in the timeline, and hit Ctrl-C in the window that pops up. Then open up the composition settings dialog, and paste that time into the Duration field. This will setup your composition to only the length of the clips. You can actually skip this last step and just set your work area bar to only the duration of your clips, but I find that shaving off that excess time makes it easier to move around in the composition.

Now, apply whatever effects you want onto your clips.

Lastly, add the composition to your render cue. If you’re planning to have any transparency in your footage, like if you’re using After Effects to key out footage (which I do all the time), you’ll want to mess with your output module settings to give an alpha channel. I find the best way to get an alpha channel is to output the composition as a QuickTime MOV with the “Millions of Colors + Alpha” option selected, since AVIs can’t include alpha channels unless they’re uncompressed, which nets you HUGE file sizes. You might want to make a custom template if you plan on doing this a lot. Click “Render” to render your composition.

Back in Premiere, simply import the modified footage. If you did like I suggested and placed the after effects footage on a separate track, you can just turn off that video track, to save for safe keeping, and drag the new footage into the layer above/below it along with all the rest of the footage.

This may have sounded long winded, but it’s actually pretty simple, I just explained a little more in depth because I’m not sure what you do/don’t know. But I’ve gotten switching down so that I can do this all within about 3 minutes, depending upon how complex the effect is.

One last thing. If all you need is an after effects plugin, you should know that MOST after effects plugins now work within the Premiere CS3 architecture, and I find myself using them all the time. The only thing is that you’ll need to copy the plugins from their place in the Program Files folder, into the Premiere plugins folder in order to get them to work. I use things like “Glow”, “CC Light Sweep”, and “Reduce Interlace Flicker” all the time in Premiere. Unfortunately, all plugins that take advantage of After Effects masks will not work in Premiere, the biggest loss being “Keylight”.

Hope this Helps.

Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com

[Jake Mannion]

I know this is a fairly ancient post, but I wanted to say thanks, Eric. Very helpful stuff, especially for chroma key! Thanks for taking the time to write it up.

[Beate Paradiso]

ancient or not, this was very helpful, I just used it, works great, thanks so much, so much more easier then importing.