Animation workflow for adding animation to long video edit

Report · Nov 30, 2018

I'm going to do animation for an 8 part video series. Each episode will have animations added to it. There will be some motion tracking, adding titles etc.

I was wondering what would be a clean and efficient workflow going about adding the animations to the edits? Would rendering out a ProRes file from the editor and working from that in After Effects be a good idea? I'd like to keep things as clean and simple as possible.

Important note: The edits have not been locked yet and there will be changes, how can I handle this best? I foresee some issues when the edit has been changed and I have to update the ProRes file, causing time shifts and messing up all the animation done previously..

Thanks in advance!

Regards,

Pieter

Report · Nov 30, 2018

If you are working full in Adobe universe I would suggest to you:
a) make your editing in Premiere Pro
b) send to AE (by dynamic link) only parts of your edits that will need motion graphics and animations
c) render everything from PPro with Media Encoder
That kind of workflow will give you flexibility and ease of introducing changes.

More on that kind of workflow:

Integration of Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects with Animate CC

Work seamlessly with After Effects |

Report · Nov 30, 2018

Thank you very much for your reply!

I should clarify, when I say editor I actually meant a person who is editing I'm sorry for not making this clear.

I don't have direct acces to the Premiere Pro files the editor is working with. That would require some sort of server right?

Do you have any tips on a more 'offline' approach?

Thanks again!

Report · Nov 30, 2018

If you are not editing those files yourselve and you are not working with project as a team project, or editor works on some other software than PPro - I gess there are no way to do your SFX and graphics other than take footage that was sended to you and work on it.

You can also (only when your editor works with PPro) request your editor to send you AE projects that he generated with edited footage that need to have sfx (special effects - let's call your work that for now) and send you that project. One condition - you have 100% of raw footahe that editor is working on and have in his AE all plugins that you will use. That way you will just send and recieve AE project files without rerendering thos files several times.

New workflow - yes, complicated? Maby. But faster than - in most cases rendering and rerendering files back and forth.

In some cases I guess it will work when you will use Motion Graphics Templates. (more on that here: Create Motion Graphics templates with Essential Graphics panel ) But here we also have one condition - your editor have to work on PPro - preferably the same update that your AE.

Report · Nov 30, 2018

Thanks again!

I've been using dynamic links a lot when working on smaller projects and really love it (whenever my computer can handle it ). For this particular project due to the large size, deadline and limited resources it's going to be hard to have all of the raw clips and assets the editor is using at my disposal unfortunately. I also noticed that you need an Adobe business subscription in order to make use of the Team projects, the editor has an Individual subscription.

I'll definitely check out the team project option and the technique you mentioned where you only switch out After Effects files for future projects. How would this work in practise? I receive one of these AE generated comps from the editor, add animation and send it back? Should we both work from the Cloud?

Thank you!

Report · Nov 30, 2018

First rule: AE is for working on shots, not editing a film.

Second rule: Don't waste your time working on frames that are going to end up on the cutting room floor.

If the editor is sending you shots or sequences that need animation added to them then break each shot that needs animation into a separate comp. Do not accept unedited shots. If they have to share footage with you that has not been trimmed then insist on in and out points so you can trim the footage in the After Effects Footage Panel before you use it in a composition. Last point, if the edit is not final make sure you include big enough handles (extra frames) on the head and tail of each shot you work on. Most of the time my handles are 60 frames or less. If the edit is final, then I do not bother with handles.

ProRez is a good format for a DI (digital intermediate), but there are also several other Mezzanine formats available. GoPro CineForm is a very good format that supports Alpha Channels and trillions of colors.

A Mezzanine format is a visually lossless codec and compression standard that is agreed on and used by everyone on the post-production team that is visually lossless and compatible with all of the software used by the team.

Report · Dec 01, 2018

Thank you for the reply Rick Gerard!

I've started animating now and the workflow I'm currently going by is indeed cutting up and pre comping all the shots that need animation from the single ProRes file. My question then is, when the edit get's updated and I receive a new ProRes file, how do I handle this new (time shifted) ProRes file?

The episodes are largely shot on consumer handycams. Would rendering in lossless codecs still be necessary in this case?

Report · Dec 01, 2018

To maintain the highest quality you should never use compressed formats for DI's. Some folks think they can get away with it, but the quality of the project always suffers. MP4 files can be especially problematic because at least half of the frames are created by calculating where the software things the pixels and colors should be.

I'm not sure that I am following your workflow. If you are getting a single ProRez file of the edited show and you are cutting that up into individual shots then you are going to have to cut up the new show and adjust the timing of every shot that is different. There are several ways to do that but there is no automatic way to do that that I can think of. The difficulty of retiming everything depends entirely on the complexity of the animations you are creating. If you are just creating animated graphics as overlays then the best option would be to use the Extended Graphics capabilities in AE and Premiere Pro so the graphics are inserted, modified, and timed to the shots right inside Premiere Pro. Another option would be to pre-compose everything that is above the footage and then use time remapping to fit the animation to the action in the shot. You could be stuck with just selecting all of the keyframes in the animations and Alt/Option-Drag the last keyframe to adjust the timing.

One thing you might be able to do that could save a lot of time is create your own set of animation presets. I have about 200 of them that I have created and another hundred or so that I have purchased that speed up my workflow. Basically, everything that you can do to a layer can be saved as an animation preset. More than half of my custom presets are based on in and out points of a layer and all the animation is created with expressions. If I need a layer to fly in from the left, bounce to a stop, then start to wiggle and fall off the bottom of the frame I have a preset that will allow me to position the layer in its hero position, set the in and out point, apply the preset and be ready to move on to the next layer. The whole process takes about 10 seconds.

If the editor is just sending you new shots then you'll still face the same kind of problems but you may be able to use timecode to speed up the process.

Report · Dec 01, 2018

I do know DaVinci Resolve has a function where it will analyse a single rendered file and automatically insert cuts when the shot changes. Then again I'm not working in Resolve and I only need the shots that will have animation on top of them.

I haven't created any presets myself, but that does sound like something extremely useful. Extended Graphics is also something I will look into.

Thanks again for the help! It is very much appreciated!

Report · Dec 01, 2018

There is an Ae script that will detect cuts and it’s called “Magnum”. if you have an editor that can export an AAF/EDL file, that’s better.

Report · Dec 01, 2018

Cool thank you!

Report · Dec 01, 2018

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Pieter+Voorhout wrote
Thank you for the reply Rick Gerard!
I've started animating now and the workflow I'm currently going by is indeed cutting up and pre comping all the shots that need animation from the single ProRes file. My question then is, when the edit get's updated and I receive a new ProRes file, how do I handle this new (time shifted) ProRes file?
The episodes are largely shot on consumer handycams. Would rendering in lossless codecs still be necessary in this case?

First off, don't even think about going near Dynamic Link. It's the spawn of a hideously inadvisable drunken night between two pieces of software that should never have even been in the same bar. Every professional studio uses the tried and trusted "old-school" file handoff workflow, where the editor exports in the best practicable format, then the FX department take the files, do their stuff and send back the same thing. The editor then just drops it into place, faffs about and hands off to color in the same way. Nobody has to care about broken plugins, missing fonts, or what software everyone is using.

However it's important to understand that most of the time the footage sent to/from FX is ungraded (and often linear). It's a lot easier to work with frames 'as seen by the camera' rather than trying to match some funky teal post-Instagramopalyptical grade that will of course be completely changed once the director sees it. In theory you could be sent the actual camera files, but that's very uncommon in big productions and not an option for raw footage since you cannot re-save it.

As Rick says, standard practice is to send every shot (or part thereof) to post as a standalone file - never the entire show. Every NLE application worth bothering about can export a single clip, or export the entire timeline as a series of clips, with handles. It might take a few more mouse clicks, but what they're expecting you to do with a full-span video is just stupid. Maybe if they gave you an EDL file you could automate the process of splitting it up into sections, but you will never have handles because they are parts of the source footage that have already been cut out of the timeline. Since you're saying that the edit isn't locked, you absolutely need handles.

As to file formats, it depends on a number of factors, which only you and your studio know. Of course you want to preserve quality, but without going overboard. If the source is handycam then you aren't bothered about cinema-quality 8K frames that will be zoomed up the wazoo, but naturally you'd avoid using a heavily compressed format like h.264, if nothing else because it's a pain to edit with. The three main contenders these days for FX post are ProRes, DNxH* and EXR frame sequences:

ProRes is close to visually lossless but is only an option if everyone works on Macs. File sizes range around a few GB per minute for 1080HD. You could probably get away with ProRes HQ (422) rather than ProRes 4444 if you don't need alpha.
DNxHD / DNxHR are as good as ProRes in terms of quality, and work on Windows, but some legacy editing suites don't support them. You also need to agree on the settings, as there's a long list of flavors to choose from. File size is about the same as ProRes.
Don't use Cineform. Blegh.
EXR has the advantage that you only need to re-render specific frames, and it has a full floating point range so you can send back footage with HDR effects, like lens glares, which react correctly when someone adjusts the exposure or adds a filmic transition. They support layers, so you can render glow or shadows separately. EXR is the standard mezzanine for big studios these days but the footage can run to over 2GB per second. Not something to download on hotel WiFi.

You could still use image sequences with a lower bandwidth format (e.g. PNG or TIFF) and get the advantage of frame-by-frame updates, but there can sometimes be problems with color shifts if the editing software doesn't understand how to profile the footage in and out of RGB. Quite a few 3D effects artists use 16-bit PNGs (approx 40MB per second for 1080HD).

So talk to the editor and see what formats they can actually read. Then ask what the colorist plans on doing to your returned files - for example if they will never crank the exposure, you don't need to worry about HDR data. Discuss each of the effects, because that can have a major bearing on what you need. If they crop in on a shot, then expect you to add camera shake, of course you need the uncropped footage or there's no way to fill in the edges.

Report · Dec 01, 2018

Dave Merchant, what's wrong with CineForm? It's a free, visually lossless high bit depth format that supports alpha channels that did not go through the ProRez recent round of bugs and is way less problematic than the many of the other formats. I've never seen a media player that had problems with it and, IMHO it's a great alternative for prosumer or consumer level video production. I use it all the time on personal projects and tutorials.

About half my clients want image sequences, but that's a lot more work for a small production.

Report · Dec 01, 2018

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Rick+Gerard wrote
https://forums.adobe.com/people/Dave+Merchant what's wrong with CineForm?

It uses full-frame wavelet compression, which looks fine on 'real' footage zoomed to 100%, but causes issues at pixel level for synthetics. You either get blurry edges, or a massive data rate (getting close to uncompressed). See an old but still relevant comparison here.

Cineform is a very old codec, it used to cost a fortune ($5000+) but then GoPro bought it, played around for a while then EOLed it into Github. GoPro also pulled their OS-level codec installer, so their official advice to people who cannot open files recorded in what was their own video format is er, dunno.

Now the SDK is being kept on Github life support by a handful of people, the industry doesn't expect it will be around long-term. Apple dropped support last month, calling it a 'legacy codec'.

Report · Dec 01, 2018

Yes that was my initial thought as well. For smaller self contained projects dynamic link works nicely as it doesn't take too much power and saves quite a bit of time re-rendering out a bunch of comps. But with these bigger projects with huge amount of assets it can get quite tricky very quickly I believe. Especially since not everyone working on it is familiar with the techniques and principles and might not be as tidy in organising their files.

The clips I'm working with have different color profiles. Some standard, some S-log 3. It's not a huge budget series so there isn't an actual colorist. Shouldn't I apply the animation on top of the final grade in order for the grading not to have effect on all the titles and graphics? I understand that for compositing you'd want the two to blend seamlessly but what I'm working on are more like overlaying motion graphics that should retain their original colors.

What would be the best way to actually achieve having handles to work with inside of After Effects? This can only be done if I have the entire clip database the editor is working with right?

We're all working on Macs so ProRes is going to be our best option I guess. Thanks for clarifying the different formats by the way, very helpful!

I will have a meeting with the editor this Monday so we'll talk these things through. Thanks for your help!

Report · Dec 01, 2018

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Pieter+Voorhout wrote
Shouldn't I apply the animation on top of the final grade in order for the grading not to have effect on all the titles and graphics? I understand that for compositing you'd want the two to blend seamlessly but what I'm working on are more like overlaying motion graphics that should retain their original colors.

If you're making overlays (lower thirds, callouts, etc) then you don't pre-compose. You send back just the overlays, in a matted or alpha-channel track, so the editor can place them into another layer that avoids the grade completely.

Rendering to clips with handles in most NLEs is a specific choice in the output module. In Premiere Pro it doesn't exist for a timeline, but you can get source footage clips with handles using the project manager "consolidate and transcode" tool. Be careful though, if the edit includes speed changes, freeze frames, etc. you won't see that in the source.