[John Williams]

As this is quite specific, in order to help, do you have some images and examples of what you are creating and screen shots of the problems you are coming up against?

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Here’s a few things to try:

In the Preferences / Previews – set viewer quality to ‘Faster.’

In the Preferences / Media & Disk Cache – try turning off disk Cache

Check your preview settings in the extended Preview window. Try turning on/off ‘Cache before playback.’

Try reducing the resolution of your Preview.

Make sure Caps Lock is not on.

If you’re machine doesn’t have enough RAM to preview the 8K files then make proxies versions which should be much lighter to work with, when you export it will revert back to the full res.

Hope one of those suggestions gives you some joy;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

I think I understand what you mean.

In After Effects once you have keyed out your coloured background and done any tweaking then if you want to Export the clip to contain the Alpha you must use an Export Format that supports an additional Alpha channel. Most video formats won’t support both RGB and Alpha so you would have to export separately so instead, choose a format that supports both.

Two formats include the default ‘Lossless’ which is an uncompressed QuickTime and Apple ProRes4444 which is also uncompressed. With either of those selected you can then choose the ‘Channels’ and select RGB + Alpha.
When exported you can bring the clip into Premiere (or any other pro NLE) and drop the clip above another clip on the timeline to see it composite instantly on the timeline.)

Note: Depending on the complexity of your keying, you can also use the Ultra Keyer in Premiere Pro that will do a good job if the green/blue screen has been well lit and filmed on a high quality camera with low compression.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Oh yes, you are exporting a file type that creates ‘Interlaced frames’ (two images in one frame that are shown every other line when viewed on a computer screen but are play simultaneously when played on a traditional television.)

Unless you are required to deliver ‘Interlaced’ (which from the sounds of what you are doing you are not) then make sure you select an Export format that uses Progressive rather than interlaced (often displayed as something like 25P or 1080P for Progressive and 50i for interlaced)

Most filming and all stop motion animation is shot as Progressive so just make sure your export type matches your media.

Let me know if you have any further questions;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

4K Footage comes in a variety of ratio’s.
1920X1080 is a 16:9 ratio. Therefore if you put footage into a sequence that has a different ratio you will see ‘black bars’ either at the top or bottom known as ‘letter box’ or on the sides know as ‘pillar box’. You get this even if you Scale Footage to the size of your sequence as Premiere doesn’t want to change the ratio and squeeze or stretch your image to fit the new ratio.

So what is generally best to do is bring in your 4K footage and scale it down using the ‘Effects Controls’ panel. As the ratio is different in your case you will loose a bit of the image on the left and right side but remove the letter box bars at the top and bottom.

If you want to avoid this in future, make sure you shoot at a 16:9 ratio (although having extra resolution on the sides can be useful if you later wish to reframe / tweak the shot.)

Hope that helps;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Just a note on Adobe Teams.
I don’t see this a solution or even a helpful way of working with collaborators unless they are within the same company as you. Teams requires you to be all managed by the same Team account which isn’t helpful when working with artists and clients who have their own creative cloud account/subscription.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

You could upload a downloadable link to somewhere like: Vimeo or dropbox.

Or private message me / follow and I can pass you an email address to WeTransfer the file to.

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

Hi Jim, I’ve been using multiple Macs on Premiere Pro (plus After Effects, Cinema 4D…) for film making and live events.

Obviously it all depends on the type of projects you are working on and the footage you are throwing at it.

The iMac Pro is quite fast and powerful, but only really at the top end. If you’re getting a mid range or lower range iMac Pro, you’re not getting much benefit over the latest iMac 2019 fully spec’d up (which is what i’m currently using) so in many cases i’d go for that (obviously with an i9 processor, best Pro Vega GPU and loads of RAM. When Premiere is tested against FCPX, it actually comes out better in some areas due to the Adobe apps use more of the GPU than FCPX and they love processor cores which the i9 has a bundle of. The iMac Pro could do with an upgrade but that won’t happen for for a while till the dust settles on the Mac Pro.

Just a few thoughts to consider:)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

If you’d like to send a short part of the clip I can take a look for you.

Best, John

John Williams

Soho Editors

[John Williams]

As you’ve realised, there’s literally loads of effects in After Effects, which ones you’ll find the most helpful depends on the kind of work you do. Motion Graphics artists will use certain effects more while visual effects artist will you others more.

Here’s a few in built effects i’d recommend:

Basics:
Gaussian Blur – accelerated general purpose blur
Lumetri Color – accelerated general purpose color correction tools
Stroke – Uses paths the create paint strokes, very useful for creating ‘reveal’ effects which is very useful for handwritten text animation.
Gradient Ramp – creates a blended gradient of two colors
Drop Shadow – simulates relief from background
Bevel Alpha – adds beveled edge to any image using it’s edge
Glow – does what you’d expect (can look better combining two Glow effects with different radius amounts)
Linear wipe – simple transition that can be animated to wipe on/off any element without needing to use masks.
Corner Pin – Resizes and distorts layers based on the fore corners.
CC Sphere – creates a simulated 3D sphere that can be applied to any image or texture

More advanced:
Camera Lens Blur – advanced natural blur effect, can be used to create depth of field
Keylight – best tool for green and blue screen removal (best used as the preset with Key cleaner + Advanced Spill Suppressor)
Transform – Very useful way of adding additional tranformations to layers that may have keyframes on the layer transforms.
Turbulent displace – Distorts any image using a generated noise pattern
Liquify – Straight out of photoshop for distorting pixels using brush tools
Remove Grain – Degrain’s noisy footage, can also be useful for smoothing skin
Timewarp – Allows retiming of footage (easier to use that the traditional ‘Time Remapping’) and adds Pixel Flow (aka Optical flow) to slowed down footage.
Particle World & Particle System – inbuilt particle generators. ‘World’ allows you to load in layers at the particle that is emitted.
Camera Tracker – 3D camera tracker, very easy and effective to use when tracking moving camera footage
Borix FX Mocha – Solid industry standard planar (surface) tracker, essential for tracking job After Effects can’t manage natively.

I’d be interested to hear what others recommend and why?

John Williams

Soho Editors