Workflow with green screen

[Vince Becquiot]

We usually do the keying last. The reason is that’s it’s much easier to edit the original footage than working with uncompressed files.

You would also be much better off keying single clips once you know what you want to keep, than trying to key your entire footage…

The way we do it (I’m not claiming it’s the best one, but it has worked flawlessly so far):

1- Do all your editing until the client approves the final cut.

2- You then have 2 options. The first is to import your project into After Effects. It’s the fastest, but that is not always a smooth transition, and you are then stuck with making any last minutes edit changes there.

The solution I like, is doing simple copy and paste.

You can either copy the clips in use from the Premiere project panel to the After Effects project panel. Change the Premiere panel to thumbnails so that your know the clips that are used in the timeline.

Or you can copy the clips from your timeline to an After Effects composition. You cannot copy from the Premiere timeline to the After Effects project panel, so make sure you create a composition within After Effects for each clip first with the appropriate length. This method will create the smallest renders and may save you the most time and space in the end.

The last thing you do is replace the clips in Premiere.

Once important note. Do a test first!!

Since your footage may have more than 2 audio channels, you may have issues replacing the footage with the mixed down stereo renders from After Effects.

While this seems to have been resolved in the latest updates, double check before you start editing.

I also usually change the source audio mappings to 2 mono channels, or one stereo channel for all the clips before I start editing. This makes things much cleaner and avoids these kind of issues.

I hope that helps you getting started.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area