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Working with PPro and AE simultaneously
I have Premiere Pro 1.5 and After Effects 6.5 as part of Adobe Video Collection. I am familiar with PPro and new to AE.
I have a video project in PPro which is a two camera shoot of facilitator/client in a therapeutic interview. It will become a DVD eventually. I have these images reduced by two-thirds and laid out in two boxes next to each other.
In the blank space on rest of the screen I want to create a mindmap from text and interconnecting lines that builds as the interview runs on. As a key word is spoken I want it to fade in. I also want new lines to emerge/be drawn on cue and to be able to highlight words already in the mindmap when they are mentioned again. I also want to be able to shift sections of the map around, zoom in and out, etc.
In other words I want it to be dynamic and timed to match what is happening in the audio/video. To do this I ideally want to be able to edit it in PPro or in some other way where I can see the whole image and synchronise it with the sound and vision.
I can think of 3 ways to achieve this, using:
1. Adobe Title Designer
2. Macromedia Flash
3. Adobe After Effects1. Title Designer is too clunky and clumsy and simplistic for what I want to achieve. It does not allow animation which means hundreds of individual title slides using PPro Effects to crossfade, etc.
2. I am more familiar with Flash and can achieve all the effects I want relatively easily. However to see the results of my editing I have to export a (rather large) AVI file and import it each time into PPro. Slo-o-ow…
3. The little experimentation I have done leads me to beleive that AE can do what I need (and way more). However, can I edit the text and see the results instantly in PPro? Or do I have to export an AVI and import it in PPro, as I do with Flash? Or do I have to import my PPro file into AE and work there?
Or is there another way entirely that my inexperience has not allowed me to notice?
I would greatly appreciate your ideas as I know what I want to achieve, I know that whichever way I do it will require time and effort and I want to make sure I use a way that will be efficient and give the reults I want in the end.
Thanks
Phil Swallow, UK
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1 Reply
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i’d definately be using AE for this – and it sounds like a great project to get your head around AE if you’re not used to it. For example, there’s a bunch of great text animation presets which can really help to liven text.
the best thing to do is finalise your edit in PPro, then import it into AE (by memory you can import the actual PPro project). Once you’ve got it into AE, you will need to stay in AE until you’re finished and you render an AVI or Quicktime or whatever and place this back into your PPro project.
You can use audio cues in AE easily – not as easy as PPro obviously (as it’s not realtime) – but it can be done.
The easiest way i find working with audio cues, is to drop your audio into it’s own composition with nothing else. Do a RAM preview of your entire comp. Then as it’s playing back in realtime, you can add markers to the layer to indicate your audio cues (by memory i think the magic button to do this is the star on the numeric keyboard section).
Once you have your layer with all the makers, you can then add comments to the marker with the corresponding text to jog your memory. Then import this layer into your main composition and you’re ready to go.
Setting this up like so does take a little bit of time (not too long, but not instant) – but it does save time in the long run. Because your other option for getting audio cues in AE is to hold down CNTRL and scrub. This works OK if you have a script infront of you, but if you don’t, it can be tedious working out what they’re saying.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
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