Inspiring

Question

Workflow suggestions between After Effects and Premiere Pro for 5 minute videos

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
September 7, 2020
3 replies
601 views

Hi. I'm going to be animating several 4-5 minute music videos and am looking for workflow suggestions to keep After Effects from getting bogged down. Some of the videos will be lyric videos which rely on expressions to keep cameras and lyrics connected. In the last video I made, the project eventually became difficult to navigate, because it would take a while for After Effects to update its composition screen every time I'd click to a new place in the timeline.

Setting the viewport display to lower resolution and lower size - and using a fast draft etc would help at times, but by the time I was halfway through the video, it was a constant battle. I thought about converting all of the expressions to keyframes (and may go back and do that as an experiment to see if it speeds things up dramatically), but I wanted to retain the functionality provided by the expressions so in the end just dealt with the lag.

I was using Dynamic Link between Premiere Pro and After Effects throughout, and I considered breaking up the Premiere Pro comp into 30 - 60 second segments instead of the single 4:45 clip, but there are many elements that get modified and re-used throughout the video - so having access to all of that in a unified project is important.

I've used proxies in the past on similar projects, and that was helpful.

Would welcome any workflow suggestions for making animation rich videos in Prem Pro and After Effects, which are sometimes expression-heavy, utilize numerous scripts, and typically run 4-5 minutes. Output is HD and I'm not usually working with 4K footage. Using lots of vector art as well as some renders from 3D programs, and typically set to music.

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R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

Here are my suggestions.

Never use After Effects to Edit a video
If you use Dynamic Link to create a composition from a shot in a Premiere Pro sequence and the composition is going to get complicated and take more than a couple of seconds a frame to render, change the color and label of the shot in Premiere Pro before you replace with an AE comp, create the comp and save it, immediately return to Premiere Pro and undo the dynamic link in Premiere Pro after the comp is created, then complete the comp and render it to a visually lossless production format (NEVER MP4), and then drop the rendered shot in the Premiere Pro sequence and place it right above the original shot
If you are creating lyric videos from scratch in After Effects, break up the audio track into phrases that are no longer than 8 bars of music or a sentence or two and create a new comp for each phrase, then render all of the sections and do the final edit in Premiere Pro (sounds like more work but it is more efficient and faster if you stay organized)
Use Adobe Audition to add markers to your audio track - they will show up in After Effects and Premiere Pro and they make editing to dialogue or music a lot easier

My typical AE comp for Dynamic Text animations / Lyric Videos is about 5 to 7 seconds. More than 90% of these projects are edited in Premiere Pro. Only a few of the very simplest comps are ever assembled in a master comp to be rendered in After Effects, and I only do that when there is no chance that the client may want changes or the audio needs to be polished.

A screenshot I have posted many times showing how I usually set up explainer videos or music videos. This one is one of the rare cases where 3 comps were combined to make a master that was about 35 seconds long. The final edit of the 10-minute explainer video was edited in Premiere Pro from 12 AE comps that I rendered, and sound effects and the final audio polished there. There were six sets of revisions to the project but I only had to open up a couple of the AE comps to make the required changes after the audio track and graphics were modified as per client request.

R

reindeer4Author

Inspiring

Thank you @Martin_Ritter , @Szalam and @Rick Gerard for the replies.

Not sure why, but the first response went into my spam folder and I only found these replies while cleaning out email today.

To follow up on a few specifics:

I didn't have many .mp4s in this particular project, but sometimes I do - so will keep that tip about transcoding to ProRes in mind for the future.

The script I used in this project to sync camera with text was Type Monkey (from AEScripts).

For this and other lyric videos in the works, everything is done from scratch in After Effects, where many scenes will rely on vector images, which I modify and break up as needed in Illustrator before bringing into AE to animate and add effects.

I've frequently used dynamic link, because I would get much faster playback of the project (audio and visuals) inside of Premiere Pro and thought the benefits of that link would outweigh any extra demand it placed on the system. But things did get to the point where Premiere Pro wouldn't update very quickly - and sometimes not at all even if I deleted rendered files and purged memory - so at times I'd have to render in Adobe Media Encoder to be certain of current state of things.

In terms of computer specs, I put this one together within the last year and it's pretty robust since I do some 3D work: AMD Ryzen 3950X at 3.5GHz with 16 core processor, 128GB DDR4 RAM, and NVidia RTX 2070 Super. When working in After Effects, I typically allocate most of the RAM toward the Adobe Products, reserving only 8RAM or so for rest of computer. I had assumed the Adobe programs shared this RAM in an intelligent manner, where most of that would be used by AE while you were working in AE even if Premiere Pro and Media Encoder were open - but I saw a recent video that suggested the RAM might be evenly divided with other Adobe programs that were open (and it's not unusual for me to have those three open at the same time, sometimes along with Illustrator or Photoshop). Can anyone confirm if that's correct - that Adobe simply divides the allocated RAM amongst open Adobe programs rather than letting the active program take the lion's share? If so, do you immediately regain use of that RAM when shutting other programs such as Illustrator an Photoshop - or would you need to restart After Effects?

In terms of working with lots of smaller comps: If I divide a five minute video into 30 ten second comps, should After Effects work efficiently as long as I'm working on one comp at a time - or does it have to keep the entire five minute video in an active state?

When I'm working on an individual 10 second comp, does it matter / use additional system resources if I have other comps open?

Thanks for all of the suggestions.

Szalam

Community Expert

What expressions are you using? That is, how are you "keeping lyrics and cameras connected"? Maybe we can figure out a more effecient way to do that part.

Also, how are you using Dynamic Link? Usually, if I'm working with Premiere Pro and AE, I don't use Dynamic Link. I do my edit in Premiere and then import the Premiere Pro project into AE with AE's Import Premiere Pro Project command. That way, I have all my cuts on their own layers. I find that a lot easier to work with and a lot less resource intensive.

Also, if you have MP4 files in your project, transcoding them to ProRes will make things faster and smoother overall. That said, if you have a decent GPU and you're on Windows, the most recent public beta of AE and Premiere has hardware decoding for H.264 files that might help things be quicker too.

Martin_Ritter

Legend

I would eleminate the Dynamic Link and playout the AE animation as image sequence or production video format (DNxHD, ProRes, Cineform) instead.

If your animation is expression heavy, dealing with a lot of video and 3D elements, you can only lower resolution, skip frames, fast draft to minimize preview rendering time.

Converting expressions to keyframes can take fairly long (the last time I did it, this process was running on one core only!) and there is no logic behind to skip unnecassary keyframes. As long as you want to edit, this is really not useful.

You can try to playout "shots" and do the edit in Premiere. You can also playout layerwise and do the composite in Premiere - depending on your artwork.

You can use the same method in AE working with proxies.

Also, work with precomps. Generally there is no problem to work with long comps in AE, put putting everying into one comp is senseless.

I usualy have a main comp with nothing but precomps in it (Scene1, Scene2 and so on). In those Scenes, there a several precomps, depending on the artwork. In those artwork comps, there are again several precomps, or the actual layers. Having 5 or more hierachy levels isn't unusal for me.

*Martin

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