Hi,
Using the Juicer is not *required* however, you might want to consider it because the Juicer knows whether the animation was created at 30 fps or 60 fps and can properly field the animations for you accordingly. You can bring right into AVID or AE or whatever but the time advantage of doing so isn’t all that great. At most it takes a 4 to 10 minutes to fully process a Jump Back in your codec via Juicer.
If I was planning to do compositing in AE or Motion I’d probably bring it in straight from the DVD to those apps. If I was going to take it straight to my editor I feel Juicer is the preferred option if you want the animation to look and playback as designed.
My 2 cents,
Dave Hebel
Digital Juice, Inc.