[Marc Nibor]

Just in case you also need to create some custom Matrix Style Code Footage…

check out Red Giants “Text Anarchy” If I remember correctly they got something in there to do exactly that.

[Marc Nibor]

Thank you Chris, I just tried what you suggested.
The markers didn’t show up dynamically in Premiere or vice versa. I tried comp and sequence markers…
Maybe it requires saving/reloading – haven’t tried that yet. But it seems that the solution that Rich suggested works perfectly.

Rich, I think your’re right. Tero already mentioned that it’s resolution dependent, so I just manually created a 5k sequence to test it and then the 1/8 and 1/16 options were available. I still don’t understand why these are not supported in 1080p.

Checking “preserve resolution when nested” as you just suggested is the perfect solution. This knowledge would have saved me already a huge amount of time in the past.
I just gave it a try and immediately got the same 0.5 FPS in Premiere that I also had in AE!
Also there was no need to put the main comp in a smaller comp… just changing the preview resolution in my main comp worked exactly as needed. This is a HUGE time saver!

Thanks to all of you for helping to solve this problem ! : )

ATTENTION:
Setting this up so that it works properly is really tricky.
So if you need faster preview speeds in Premiere for your Direct Link AE compositions you need to do the following in EXACTLY this order. Otherwise the preview will just be a small “thumbnail” in the top left of your preview window.

– it’s all about the settings of your preview resolution at the bottom of your Composition window in AE. Change it from Full to something that gives you a usable speed. If “quarter” is still to slow, use custom and try 8×8, 12×12 or 16×16… anyhing belwo that will be barely recognizable. save your AE project

– import the AE comp in Premiere and place it on the timeline. you will notice that premiere will display your AE composition in Full resolution and not in the one that you just chose inside of AE – this is OK!

– go back to you AE project… in case you have closed it already just rightclick on it in the timeline of Premiere and choose “edit original”… this will open AE and the composition.

– now back in AE, rightclick on the name of the composition tab in your timeline > choose “composition settings” and make the Advanced Tab active.
put a checkmark at “preserve resolution when nested” and hit ok.
Save your project. You also can close AE now if you don’t need to keep it open for editing.

– depending on the complexity of your comp it might take some time until the update can be seen in premiere and the preview speed should be much better now. (of course the resolution is low)

– once you are done with all your edits in Premiere and you are ready to render your Premiere Project, you HAVE TO reopen your AE comp > remove the check from “preserve resolution when nested” and SAVE! Otherwise your render will be messed up by small versions of the AE comps.

Again… all this has to be done in exactly this order.
Do not save your AE file with “preserve resolution when nested” turned on, before you import the comp in Premiere.
If you do so by accident, you just need to delete the AE comp completely from your Project – timeline AND Project browser and reimport it after you made the appropriate changes.

Good luck and fast previewing!

EDIT:
just came back to this post after two months to look up the procedure…. followed every step exactly as described and still got the problem with the stamp sized preview in the top left corner!
Finally could fix it by setting Playback and Paused resolution in Premiere to anything else but Full!

[Marc Nibor]

Alex, this is a GREAT tip… I did not know about AE Proxies until now.
I just looked it up and checked the basic functionality.
Right in this particular case I’m not sure though if it will solve my problem.

The reason why I used dynamic link in this case is that I need to “sync” several moving things inside of the AE project to all the rest in Premiere. Basically just slide and nudge stuff back and forth and fix animation keyframes until everything lines up. From what I’ve understood so far, using the proxies turns the elements temporarily into “stills” – which in this case prevents me from doing what I need to accomplish.

EDIT: just to make sure this is clear enough…. I got BOTH programs open. So I adjust keyframes etc in AE and then check if everything lines up with what I have in premiere.

To make a long story short… can you think of ANY way how to speed up things on the preview resolution end… either in Premiere or in AE so that in this case I can leave the content alone?

The only Idea I had by myself so far is to take the AE render comp > create a new comp at 1/16th of the size and place it inside of it… then temporarily use this comp in Premiere.

EDIT 2:
…I just tried that and it does NOT work as I expected!
When I preview the superlowres comp directly in AE I get 0.5FPS which is still acceptable.
Previewing the same comp in Premiere via Dynamic link gives me one frame every 15 Seconds!
I think the reason is that dynamic link only uses a single core.
…. I guess need to look for a different approach ; )

I was expecting the same functionality by reducing the preview resolution in premiere with the click of just one button… but that brings me back to the start…. why is it greyed out? (which was only partially answered yet ; )

[Marc Nibor]

Thank you Tero,
in that case I think I need to completely rephrase this question.

I am working with a quite renderheavy AE composition which I inserted with dynamic link. The preview is obviously VERY slow.

I am looking for a way to speed up the rendering of the preview in Premiere. In AE I do this by just changing the preview resolution to for example 16/16 which makes it possible to get decent speed.

Right now it takes roughly 20 seconds to update one single frame in premiere due to the complexity of the composition.

I got two possibilities…
a) render out the clip in AE and do this back and forth a few times until it fits
b) find a way to speed up the preview…. the only way I can think of is to somehow reduce the resolution of the Preview… but 1/4 is still not enough.

Maybe I can use a different sized temporary precomp an load that instead of the final comp in Premiere until I am done with editing would work?

What resolution does it have to be in so that 1/16 is available for preview?
… and maybe more important… does the preview resolution setting in premiere even affect the preview render resolution of the AE part?

[Marc Nibor]

Thank you Steve. That was some very helpful information – exactly what I was looking for!
Actually I went through several lengthy tutorials about the Roto Brush before I posted this question. Surprisingly none of them mentioned this bit of information.

[Marc Nibor]

Thanks for all the recommendations.

After spending almost a full day trying countless approaches and checking several demos I finally found the in my opinion “best” solution which I’m going to share now.

As some of you stated the built in “resizing” in Premiere (Motion>Scale) does a pretty decent job.
After some side by side comparison there was no huge difference between Premiere and the Plugin/Standalone resizing solutions when comparing the RESIZING part alone.
But there are more parameters involved than just the resizing.

Soon I found out the the “magic” is in the Sharpening. All Softwares/Plugins do some “post processing” which is more or less just some kind of Sharpening. Some do it quite good while others give the result a very plain artificial look.

So I kept using the standard resizing of Premiere and started looking for the best Sharpening solution.
Again… the built in Unsharp Mask of Premiere is very good.
But the Boris Continuum Unsharp mask has a few more parameters and one of those finally helped me to achieve excellent results. It’s the “Mix with original” Parameter.
The trick is to use quite high settings for the unsharp mask which normally would look unrealistic and blend it with the original footage by using this parameter.

I guess it also might work if you use the built in unsharp mask with high settings and blend it over a duplicate of the unprocessed footage. Maybe it’s even better when using it with different blending modes. The BCC Unsharp mask worked straight out of the box though and gave much better results than all the dedicated resizing options I tried.

One last tip. Before the resizing make sure your footage is as “clean” as possible. I did some denoising first. If you got noisy source footage and apply the sharpening before it’s cleaned up you might get real ugly results.
Just make sure to do the denoising FIRST. (check the order in the effects stack)

hope that helps someone.

[Marc Nibor]

Thanks for all the hints…

Plain upsizing doesn’t do the job in this case. It was the first thing I tried.

Instant 4K looks like it might do the trick though. I will take a look at it!

[Marc Nibor]

It’s quite hard to tell, looking at your example. But it looks like you made the mistake almost everyone makes when using mocha for the first time.

Was your cursor (timeslider) at the correct position when you pasted the keyframes?

Make sure to move your timeslider in after effects to exactly the same position where you started to track in mocha.

this means if you started tracking at 0.00 you must be sure that your timeslider is exactly there when you paste the keyframes.

I’m almost certain that this is the cause of your problem since tracking this footage without an error should be a piece of cake for mocha.

[Marc Nibor]

Thank you Kalle,
I think this is what I was looking for. I have read about this expression some time ago… but completely forgot about it.

If anyone is interested too and needs some basic info…. here it is:
https://youtu.be/fo5E0nK5XjE

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[Marc Nibor]

Thank you for mentioning these additional possibilities, but no Dave, the sizes are not the reason. Although I think the size of the outer box wouldn’t matter anyway.
I think it’s the footage itself that is not ideal.

Since this is a problem that happens quite often when dealing with difficult footage I am actually looking for a solution to FIX THE TRACKED SOLUTION, rather than trying to optimize the footage which is often a dead end.

To be a little more specific. In this case the track is simple. It’s a slow and long movement and the tracked result looks like a perfectly smooth curve. When zooming in though, the curve reveals a sawtooth movement.
I am looking for a tool or script that “intelligently” averages out the tiny sawtooth jitter according to the big picture.

The built in AE smoother is supposed to do just that – if I’m not wrong. But it did never work out for me… the results were either not noticeable or threw the result off by miles. (I’ve spent lots of time to get it right and applied changes in the smallest possible ranges.)
Then there is the TrackerViz Script which does it’s thing by averaging multiple tracks.

I am already done with my current project using AE smoother gave me a usable result in the end. But only since this is a very forgiving shot. I know from experience that it wouldn’t have worked out if the movement hadn’t been that smooth. I am Still looking for a better solution that I can use the next time I run into this problem.

So, to make a long story short.
Does anyone know of a way to filter out (average out) micro jitter from the tracked keyframes?

Thank you for reading ; )