Loss of clarity when dynamically moving between PPro and AE CS6

[Todd Kopriva]

If you’re adding effects in Premiere Pro and then sending that to After Effects, not all of those effects will survive the trip. See the last table on this page for a table that lists what effects are converted when going that direction.

The presumption is that if you are doing any effects work and using Dynamic Link to After Effects, you are going to do the effects work in After Effects.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
product manager, professional video software
After Effects team blog
Premiere Pro team blog
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[Dustin Bowser]

I’ve noticed this same thing.

No effects in the Premiere Timeline. Also, within After Effects the clip is sharp and how it should be. Back in Premiere it’s very noticeably of a lower quality.

Quality of the playback is set to FULL.

[Dustin Bowser]

I also just did a test where I took a clip in my Premiere CS6 timeline, sent it to AE via dynamic link and did a warp stabilize. I then rendered that out of Premiere, and straight out of After Effects using the same codec settings, and the one out of Premiere is noticeably softer.

I brought both clips back into After Effects so I could stack them together on the same frame and toggle back and forth between the two and they aren’t the same at all.

I do Flame work at a shop and was hoping that potentially CS6 would be another Online/Finishing solution for us, but unfortunately that isn’t possible with issues like this.

[Todd Kopriva]

Dustin, why are you using Warp Stabilizer in After Effects instead of just using it in Premiere Pro?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Dustin Bowser]

It was just something I threw on there to test, obviously for that effect specifically I could’ve done it in Premiere, but what I’m trying to test out is the viability of using Premiere/After Effects as a finishing tool for use with clients. That is why this ‘softening’ that is happening when coming back to Premiere makes it not a workable solution, unless there is something that can be done about it.

The reason I’m investigating Premiere/After Effects instead of finishing just in After Effects (yes I’m aware of the Social Network video) is that I need a way to do clean up tasks and compositing, and then have a way to play it all in realtime in the context of an edit, which is something that After Effects on it’s own can’t do due to the nature of it’s RAM previewing…

I would be very excited if I could get this workflow sorted out, as I’m originally an After Effects compositor and feel like I can do things much faster and in half the steps than in a Flame which feels a bit clunky and old-school compared to the way I’m used to working. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to use a setup like this though unless it was Fast and Stable so that there aren’t any hiccups during a client session.

If you have any suggestions about hardware, or trouble shooting ideas, I’m all ears because I’d be ecstatic if I could work this way instead.

[Dustin Bowser]

Any thoughts though, on the loss of quality issue when using Dynamic Link?

[Todd Kopriva]

So far, the examples given involve effects applied that behave differently between the two applications (sharpening in the case of the original poster, and Warp Stabilizer in your case). It’s hard to comment on issues regarding “softness” in this context.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Ivan Myles]

[Zach Robbins] “I’m working on a product video and have done all cutting, editing, sharpening, and color correcting in Premiere Pro CS6. Then, I exported from Premiere Pro at full quality, then used Adobe Dynamic Link to create a comp (pulling in the rendered video) in After Effects to do final touchups with masking, grain removal, and adding a custom vignette–which will pull dynamically back to PPro CS6 without having to re-render. However, when I move everything to AE, something is lost in clarity and quality.”

Please clarify if I am interpreting your workflow correctly:

[1] Import source files to Premiere Pro
[2] Edit sequence and add effects
[3] Export an intermediate file “at full quality” from Premiere Pro (Adobe Media Encoder)
[4] Create a composition in After Effects with a dynamic link to the rendered file
[5] Process the intermediate file in After Effects; save as an AE project
[6] Import the AE project into Premiere Pro
[7] Export final file from Premiere Pro (Adobe Media Encoder)

There are a couple of easy things to address within your current workflow. First, use a lossless codec in step [3] if you need to export an intermediate file. Second, set project bit depth in After Effects to 24- or 32-bits.

More importantly, though, the workflow should be simplified. The traditional sequence is from source files to Premiere Pro to After Effects to Adobe Media Encoder. If you want to export from Premiere Pro, use After Effects to pre-process the source files, and then complete the rest of your work in Premiere:

[a] Import source files to After Effects for any clips that require AE processing
[b] Process the source files and save as AE project files
[c] Import the AE projects and other source files to Premiere
[d] Edit and apply additional effects in Premiere
[e] Export the final render from Premiere (Adobe Media Encoder)