Premiere Pro & After Effects CS5 Workflow

[Greg Baber]

Once you replace your footage with an AE Comp, that comp will show in Premiere just like a normal clip. So you can keep editing your movie inside of Premiere.

Your workflow is great when working with individual clips. Your friend’s workflow is more for the finalized edit. Both are valid.

You are correct, his workflow does mean he has to render out of AE.

Greg Baber, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Creative Cloud Expert – DVA

[Justin Sims]

So the best workflow that I can see is one that doesn’t quite exist, by being able to send a near final version (meaning multiple clips at once on the same timeline) to AE, but still have the ability to fully edit it. This could happen if I would just chop up my AE dynamic link file that PPro created within my timeline, but I don’t have all the functionality of a normal clip within Premiere.

Well thank, your answer was a big help.

[Danny Nieder]

Yes, when you send a bunch of clips over to AE, they come back as one long Dynamic Link clip that is the size of your comp. You could send each clip over separately to AE to keep them as DL clips on your timeline, but that becomes totally crazy if you have lots of clips. That is why it is very beneficial to lock picture before you do the hard work of grading.

But, I also understand the need to have the flexibility to make changes. FWIW, my workflow is like this:

Get as close as possible to picture lock on my sequence in Premiere.
Copy all of my clips on the timeline
Open a new Comp in AE that matches my sequence settings. (If I had done any previous DL clips, I use the same AE project – critical to only use one AE project per Pr project)
Paste my sequence into AE – each clip will show up on its own layer, complete with transitions and most Pr effects if you have added them
Do my color grade with Denoiser, Colorista, and unsharp mask
Here is where you can make a choice: You can grab that sequence in Pr as a Dynamic Link and place it on your timeline – this will allow you to keep making changes to your sequence in AE which will be reflected back in Pr. The downside is that you will have to render a preview in Pr which can be very time consuming in order to playback in realtime.
Or, you can render out the sequence in AE (like your friend does) utilizing the multi-processing power of your CPUs. This will most likely go much faster, and then you can import that render and put it into your Pr timeline. The downside is that your sequence is no longer flexible and is baked-in to that file.

Another option is to use Colorista 2 (if that is your app of choice) right on your clips in Pr. Then, you will have absolute flexibility in your editing and re-editing. The downside here is that Colorista is sluggish and the GUI is harder to use within Premiere.

There is no absolute clear winner in the workflows that have complete flexibility and speed.