[Dave Johnson]

You just have to render to a format that supports alpha channel such as a QuickTime movie and select “RGB + Alpha” in the “channel” settings of your AE output module. Before rendering, toggle the “Transparency Grid” button at the bottom of your AE comp viewer (the checkerboard icon) to make sure you don’t have a solid or something else behind your text that will block your alpha channel.

[Dave Johnson]

AE expert Mylenium provided some useful details about this subject on another forum so I thought I’d share here for anyone else who might face a similar challenge …

Mylenium – 10:45pm Feb 5, 09 PST (#2 of 4)

As Navarro said: Should be no problem. Be aware, though, that several of the “Edit original” and “Open in Bridge” type functions will always resort to the most modern version and these functions thus will not work fully in older versions. If e.g. you chose to “Browse Presets” in AE CS3 with CS4 already on your system, it would open Bridge CS4 and you would be able to view the presets, but could not apply them with a double-click as you would otherwise. Also expect some confusion when working with MPEG stuff. You may get warnings about missing CoDecs in Encore and Premiere or weird licensing warnings (“not included in trial version” and such…)

[Dave Johnson]

Do you have access to any third-party plugins?

Digital Film Tools (much of which is now Tiffen DFX) has day4night and nightvision filters as well as many other great CC filters that can make your goal easier. As Dave L. suggested, the key is getting believable placement, gradation and variety of colors (as opposed to an even blanket of blue or green tint over the entire scene).

Also, I don’t recall if its in that set or another (I have to search for it each of the rare occasion I need it), but one of the more popular plugin sets has a very good multi-layer fog generator that has helped me achieve better realism in manipulating similar scenes … not only would a subtle grey mist floating through the scene help achieve the swampy look, but the affect of the fog’s motion over the footage can help avoid the look of a static color cast evenly dispersed throughout the length of the scene.

Of course, if you don’t have access to third-party filters, anything that they can do can be done with AE’s built-in tools … just takes a lot more tweaking and, thus, time. Best of luck.

[Dave Johnson]

[(best settings, lossless) … I need to render it … after rendering, the footage is not as sharp and the motion looks weird.]

Sounds like you rendered to a different codec from AE than your FCP sequence … you might try using AE’s render settings & output module options to make your own settings rather than using the “best settings, lossless” preset, which I don’t recall off-hand, but I doubt very much defaults to DVC-Pro HD. Note, to avoid re-render in FCP, you’ll need to make sure everything about your AE render matches your FCP sequence … codec, frame rate, audio settings, etc., etc. Most likely, that will resolve the footage differences as well.

[Dave Johnson]

In the Composition menu, go to “Preview” and check “Audio”.

Note I’m still on CS2 so the option may have moved in CS3 or CS4, but its probably close by, if not the same, and probably still called the same thing.

[Dave Johnson]

Thanks much, Chris … I was soooo hoping that would be the answer! Just to be sure in case others chime in, which I hope they do, I am talking about on a Windows machine.

I know I can uninstall, but my concern is that if an issue running two versions would force me to uninstall one, it seems that issue would also have a high probability of corrupting the version I don’t uninstall and, in my situation, there is less than zero room for downtime, which is what inspires the questions in the first place.

[Dave Johnson]

If you render to QuickTime movies and use the “embed project link & copy” in your AE output module options, you can also import the entire project the movie was rendered from by importing the rendered movie as a project instead of as media … allows you to do what you asked, but also serves as a very handy extra backup copy of your AE project … I never render any other way.