Music Video all in AE CS3

[Gabe Cotto]

Mark,

I would not suggest editing an entire music video inside of AE unless you have no deadline and an extreme amount of patience. Render times will kill you, and if you looking to match your edits to the beat/lyrics of your music AE doesn’t have real time audio playback while your compositing. You have to do a RAM Preview. You can use the wave form to match beats, but that it is a tedious process. I suggest you learn more about After Effects before you decide to move on with this project.

best of luck.

G

“Auto save is life.”

[Spidy2167]

Gabe, Thanks for your responce. I pretty much thought that would be the answer, but I had to hear it. Your right, I do need to learn more about AE, that is one of the reasons I’m wanting to use it with this project and your answer was apart of my lesson. You just saved me a whole lot of time.
Thanks again.
Mark.

[Marc Brown]

I’ll offer my thoughts. I just wrapped up a two hour video. Here’s a brief rundown of the steps I took to achieve some of the quality I was after:

1) Imported the videos into PPro 2.0 via Avisynth, as RGB (converted from YUV). This was done because PPro will chop off any luma above 235 or below 16, the moment you add an effect or adjustment. This is a bit hair-brained, because I have yet to encounter a digital camcorder which does not utilize all of the luma range above 235. Adjustments must then be made to the videos in order to compensate for the fact that their actual luma range is 16-255.

3) Did my edits.

3) Exported as RAW RGB. All of it. And the whole point was to shift luma from its original 16-255 to 0-255 (or 16-235, as the case may be) without simply chopping it off.

3) Imported the lot into AE. As Gabe Cotto helpfully points out, editing in AE is possible but terribly impractical. It’s best to be very sure of one’s edits before importing the footage. AE is very slow at previewing video (RAM or otherwise). I would say this is the #1 reason behind PPro’s existence. It even feels engineered that way. And let’s face it: The only possible reason why AE can’t preview audio without loading whole chunks into RAM is so AE doesn’t step on PPro’s toes.

4) Did my compositing.

5) Currently encoding with AE. I’ll be using Encore to create the disc image but that’s all I’m going to touch that app for. Not only does Encore fail to support multiple cores for encoding (a conspicuous lack, in essentially the only disc-authoring app that can boast Blu-ray support), but it’s so buggy that one is literally risking days of processing time in the hope that Encore won’t decide – the moment it finishes encoding – that it can’t find some file or other, and instantly lose everything it just did. Out of the dozen or so test disc images I had Encore try to make, two-thirds of them crapped out in the fashion I described.

The #1 thing that would speed this workflow up would be for Premiere Pro to begin handling YUV video more intelligently. Currently, it’s atrocious. Try importing some DV video, turning on the YC monitor, and adding a brightness/contrast adjustment. Watch your video’s waveform get crushed. Yet you don’t see this happen in PPro’s preview window because said window is _already_ crushing those details, underscoring the inexcusability of PPro’s YUV handling. What’s probably worse is that PPro never indicates that it’s performing this destructive process.

AE has similar shortcomings. It won’t indicate, for example, what it’s doing to a 59.94fps video when said video is imported into a 29.97fps composition. AE interlaces it. But was that what the user was after? Without some sort of heads-up, how can they know? It has to be tested. That’s pretty weak.