Importing Premiere projects is really messy.

[Marcus Lyall]

I just saw this from Todd.

My guess is that you’ve done something to the clips in Premiere Pro that is causing this change in behavior. An unaltered clip in Premiere Pro will come across as a clip/layer in After Effects, but—for example—a clip that uses certain effects or the Scale To Frame Size option will come across as a precomposition to encapsulate those changes.

So I used Scale to Frame Size.
Thus the precomping…. Er….. Why would this put it into a precomp?

How about calling it ‘fit to comp’, like AE, and have them do the same thing, without the precomp feature?

The idea of having software tools in a product line is that they kinda work the same way. Like a common metaphor…
So why don’t they work the same?

I’m going back to using these tools after a while away from front-line VFX.
There’s a lot of stuff that between these two apps that seems really kinky.
Like there’s now a great colour corrector in PR, but you can only add it in PR, even though it would be kinda super-handy in AFX.
But you can kinda add it when you convert the project, but you kinda don’t get the interface.
And then all the effects are grouped differently. Like PR is a few versions behind… and ahead at the same time….

This doesn’t feel like complicated stuff, surely?
If it’s legacy support, isn’t it time to standardise under the shiny new CC banner?

[Marcus Lyall]

“But you have to remember that both AE and PP were bought from other software developers…”

CoSA? Er. That was some time back in the last century, wasn’t it?

“I guess it all depends on whether you consider re-writing software from scratch to be easy or not…”

We’re not talking major stuff here.

Things like trying to use the Mercury Engine for playback in AE with GL-compatible effects for instance. That’s hard stuff. Just calling the same effect the same thing and putting it in the same place?
That’s a UI tweak.

It just feels like there are two dev teams on different floors, who don’t sit down for lunch together that often.

[Marcus Lyall]

It’s irrelevant if the core code and data structures haven’t been altered to be the same between the two applications… and since they DON’T play nicely together in a lot of fundamental ways, I think it’s a safe bet that they indeed have not been touched for a very long time.

So here’s the thing. Most programmers will tell you that software is about 10% coding and 90% UI dev. Maybe slightly different for video.
The UI of AE is amazingly baroque, but we like it in a comfy old sofa kinda way, right?

The strange diagonal arrangement of clips.
The seemingly pointless node interface designed to ward off the Discreet Logic Flint threat of the late 90’s.
The illogical 3d camera interface with the mickey mouse ears and the Film size in the wrong dimension that has been with us since AE5.

I can live with all of this.

But the changes that have happened since the time AE was written are so immense, that it beggars belief that the code base hasn’t changed dramatically.
I know AE is frame-based, essentially Photoshop controlled by a timeline.
I know it’s barely taken seriously by post companies, because of it’s relative inefficiency.
I know it’s almost totally unable to use the magic of Open GL for realtime effects.
But I quite like it after 20 years. It’s still quite fun.
Although I have to say that C4d is a LOT more fun. Because you can, like, push the play button and watch a whole 3d world go by in realtime.
Which is what modern code allows you to do.

Aw, c’mon, quit talking about low-hanging fruit like that and start asking about the necessity for a nested comp to accommodate scaled video… and all of a sudden, the fundamental differences between the two applications becomes very clear.

Besides, what name do you give the feature during your UI tweak? It’s AE name or its PP name? Either way, someone doesn’t like it.

You don’t even have to nest the video unless you use that one stupid scale command. I didn’t even know it was nested in Pr.

We have to use AE feature names because we are on the AE forum, right?