[Danny Nieder]

This may or may not be the culprit, but it is critical that you only have 1 premiere project and 1 AE project linked together. To accomplish this, follow this workflow:

With your first dynamic link of a new project, do what you are already doing: right click and choose “replace with After Effects comp” This will open AE, and you can begin to work on your clip. While you are still working in this open editing session, you may send as many new clips over to AE by doing the same process – right click, replace with AE comp. This should always open new comps in AE with your clips and the changes should be reflected in Premiere.

However, once you close AE and/or Premiere, when you restart your editing, do NOT click on replace with AE comp on any new clip you want to work on. First, right click on a previous dynamically linked clip (doesn’t matter which one…) and click on Edit Original. This will open up AE with your previous project (The only one linked with Premiere, if you have done this right) and it essentiall tels Premiere – this is the AE project I want to send new dynamic links to. Now, you can right click on new clips and hit Replace with New AE comp, and it will “talk” to the correct AE project.

Does that make sense? This will keep the dynamic links talking to each other…

[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.

[Danny Nieder]

Even though the card isn’t a Adobe supported CUDA card, you can try to toggle Colorista to use the GPU instead of the CPU – it is under “options” at the end of the effect list. I don’t know if Colorista can only support certain graphic cards, so it may be greyed out for you.

Having said that, even though I have a GTX 285 in my MacPro – a card that is pretty highly benchmarked with Colorista – I find the process to still be pretty sluggish within Premiere. I, like you, struggle a bit with a workflow that allows me some flexibility after doing a color grade.

My current workflow which has allowed things to be somewhat speedy is after locking picture, I select all of the clips in the timeline and paste them into a blank composition in After Effects which matches my footage specs. This gives you one layer for each clip in your sequence. (If you have a very long sequence with lots of cuts, you may want to break this up into multiple comps) Most of the transitions and effects that you add in Pr make their way over to AE. (Warp Stabilizer will not, forcing you to re-analyze, but if you had put a colorista effect on a clip in Pr, it will show up in AE) Then, in AE you can do a color pass – denoiser, colorista and unsharp mask, etc – with a much better and faster interface.

Then, you have 2 options. You can go back to Pr and import that AE comp as a Dynamic Link, and add it to another video track in your timeline. The benefit here is that if you do have to make more color changes, you can work on your AE comp and have it update live in your sequence. But, the downside is that Pr will not playback in realtime (most likely) and the preview render can take a very long time, depending on your sequence length, codec, etc…

Or, you can render out of AE and import the file into Pr. You will have your color baked into the sequence and won’t be able to dynamically change it, but by rendering it in AE, you can leverage multi-processor rendering. It will be much much faster to see it play back in realtime. But, looking at your computer specs again, I think that may be moot. This is more important when you are running on a MacPro with many cores.

So, the summary is that Colorista 2 is slower in Pr than Ae, but you can give a try to processing using the GPU option, if available.

[Danny Nieder]

Annoying, isn’t it!? There is no way to stop it…an Adobe engineer knows about it and I have submitted a bug report. Hopefully this gets taken care of, because it is terrible. The best you can do is to not hide Pr, but just let it run in the back of other windows. The little Auto-Save progress bar will still pop in from of everything, but at lease Pr won’t take over your desktop.

[Danny Nieder]

Hope this old thread can find its way back to someone’s attention.

In addition to the question I posted above, I have another with the workflow suggested by Petros.

When I get into AE and do a pre-compose, I am getting a new comp that includes the entire media clip from Pr, not just the subset of in-out that was in the timeline in Pr. That would mean i have to re-edit this clip down manually to match what i have in Pr. Am I pre-composing wrong?

Thank you for your help on this.

[Danny Nieder]

Another cool thing is once you have your windows set up, if you want to temporarily zoom one palette, bin or window to full screen, hover your mouse over it and hit the tilde key.

Second, now with CS6, it can utilize Open CL on a laptop….just not the one you have now.

See this page for the features and requirements:
https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2012/05/opencl-and-premiere-pro-cs6.html

So, if you do get your new laptop (wait until June 11 for WWDC!) you will probably be able to get realtime playback of the color correction/split screen situation.

[Danny Nieder]

A couple of things:
Do you have or are you thinking of getting a CUDA enabled card? This will change things quite a bit – a lot of effects are optimized for realtime playback…color correction, etc. That would eliminate the need to render.

Second, you can position your palettes, windows and bins however you want – actually a very cool and powerful feature in Adobe products to customize your editing environment – and then once you have it where you want, go to Window>Workspace and save the layout. You can save multiple layouts and switch between them, like for example, audio editing, color correction, etc.

[Danny Nieder]

I bet in time, Speedgrade will receive a bit more of the look/feel of the Adobe suite, and also gain Dynamic Linking. When that happens, it will be a no-brainer to send over clips or sequences to be graded in Speedgrade. It looks like a pretty powerful program (despite not having curve adjustments?!) but the workflow at this point seems to not be ideal.

For now Dynamic Link to AE with Colorista 2 is a good solution.

[Danny Nieder]

I think part of the reason is that both Color and Speedgrade were purchased from other software developers. In both cases, Adobe and Apple didn’t have the time (or plans) before release to incorporate many GUI changes into their suites. For Apple, they abandoned the FCP Suite, so Color won’t ever be developed into Apple’s GIU designs. I think Adobe will slowly change some of the elements on further releases of Speedgrade.

[Danny Nieder]

Well, in defense of AJA, Adobe made things a bit difficult for 3rd party cards in previous versions – AJA had to jump through some hoops. But, this is something that has been addressed with Transmit in CS6. I am anxious to see if Transmit actually works.