[Tim Kolb]

well…keep in mind that After Effects is working with very small time spans on a comp typically. Also, AE doesn’t have to play back in “real time” at speed like Premiere Pro does…you wouldn’t want your audio to be playing back as dynamically on a PPro timeline as the framerate sloshes around in an After Effects preview…

I don’t know if editors really consider how many frames constitutes a meaningful “preview” in AE vs how many frames you’d need to have in RAM to be as useful in PPro…

You’d need another tower beside your workstation filled with RAM…and liquid nitrogen.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I don’t know that messing around with the frame designations will amount to much…

Have you tried leaving the stock settings alone and running it with “max render quality” checked?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

You may significantly improve your results by slowing the footage to 50%, evenly separating each field to be the source for a new frame.

You’re also scaling the frame size as well?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Did you find the Common folder? There are certain effects that are installed with AE, but are shared between AE and PPro through the Media Core…

Some of the effects installed with Premiere Pro are actually AE effects however… I wonder if this one is in PPro’s plugin folder?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

You actually have a superior solution to the MPEG Streamclip route… I guess I’ve gotten so used to everyone wanting to solve the problem for no cost that I didn’t even think about CineForm…which is quite unusual for me.

CineForm’s codec is extremely high quality and very computer NLE-friendly, so you probably have one of the better available solutions there. You’ll probably get as close to zero loss as you can be with the CineFormHD. Codec.

So… Well played.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Regarding Dynamic Link:

I think what is “up to par” is a moving target. Computer hardware seems to be catching up to Adobe’s capabilities about three years after release…as I mentioned in another thread.

RED footage is a special case as it is not only the massive pixel count, but contrary to what you said about RED footage…it is aggressively compreessed. Just doing the decode, and then the de-bayer process on RED footage for simple playback is beyond the reach of most, even relatively powerful, computers.

And…since RED footage (like all RAW image media) is so unprocessed coming in, there is some work for the software to do. When you combine this with the fact that you have RED footage that has been through a compositing process in RGB (in AE…and what color management setup you use in AE in this scenario could make quite a diffrence as well…), and is then dynamic linked to a PPro timeline that is running not in RGB, but is Y’CbCr…you’ve got some serious compression and color conversion acrobatics happening there…

While I’d agree with you that Dynamic Link used the way you did it in this scenario probably wasn’t the most elegant approach, I think the fact that RED footage at 4K stresses most “off-the-shelf” production pipelines from any manufacturer definitely adds a layer of challenges for the hardware alone…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hi Vivek,

I typically tell people that neither Mercury or Dynamic Link are magical (unfortunate actually) in that the software cannot do things that take massive amounts of computing power unless it can draw on massive amounts of computing power.

Your machine probably edits just fine, but Adobe has optimized to NVIDIA display cards, so your Radeon card isn’t helping you in respect to Adobe’s functioning at least…

Next we have to consider that AVCHD and DSLR footage are liklely second only to RED footage for decoode complexity. These formats challenge even monster machines with CUDA capable display cards when using multiple layers and effects.

Third…in this case, you’ve taken a complex video format…which runs well in Premiere Pro because the color encoding that PPro runs in… “YUV” (or more correctly, Y’CbCr) is what video formats are typically encoded as…and indeed so is AVCHD. The strain on the system comes in when you put the clip in AE. After Effects does not operate in “YUV”, it operates in RGB. Now your very complex AVCHD clip needs not only to be decoded, but also converted to RGB…then applying whatever color correction you’ve applied in AE…then the dynamic linked comp needs to convert back to YUV in PPro when you’re playing the timeline, not to mention that AE is running in the background to try to generate preview frames to serve to PPro, but both apps are likely trying to use the same GPU resources on a display card that is likley gasping to try to keep up.

All things considered, I’d say your machine is probably going to strain when using dynamic link for AE comps in PPro in general, so you’ll want to use it in places where you can put up with the preview sluggishness for some other benefit. In this case, color correcting in AE and using a DL AE comp in PPro isn’t really ideal from a technical standpoint anyway, and AVCHD is probably one of the more stressful formats you could use in that scenario on top of all of that.

Adobe has given us software for the last 5-7 years that is running out about 3-4 years ahead of hardware development. Anyone who doesn’t believe me can find someone running CS3 or even CS2 on a big Windows 7 machine. It moves faster than you can think. The drawback of course is that most of the video formats we use now didn’t exist when those applications came out and they only work with intermediate workflows with today’s newest formats.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Alex makes a good suggestion, though I think FCP will need a video file that it can read for the project to really work in FCP. I don’t know if there would be a way for FCP to see even a proxy video file through the dynamic linked comp that is what PPro considers to be the “asset”.

…I always reserve the right to be horribly wrong, so if I am, someone chime in…

How many shots are there? Is each “instance” on your PPro timeline a separate AE comp?

If you are simply headed to. FCP to use Color as a finishing pass…would simply outputting a DPX frame sequence be out of the question?

I take it you’re in PPro on a Mac with FCP installed?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

CS3 doesn’t support the codec directly (the format didn’t even exist until well after CS3’s release.)

My colleagues who use FCP seem to have excellent luck with a shareware program called “MPEG Streamclip” when they use it to convert DSLR footage to XDcamHD…

CS5 supports the codec natively, so I haven’t converted any DSLR footage for some time myself. I know the leap from CS3 to CS5 can require some expenditure beyond the software itself if you need to upgrade to 64 bit, but if you’ll be woking with DSLR footage frequently, it might be worth a look.

Good luck with it. I think in the short term MPEG Streamclip will probablyy get you going.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Richard is correct.

In the short term, you could yank out that fx pluginand see if you can start.

You may also consider reinstalling After Effects, as there may be some problems there. An AE reinstall should fix that plugin.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,