After Effects Multiple User Workflow?

[boone@beliefagency.com]

Does anyone have a workflow for multiple users to work on the same After Effects project? Sometime it works to bring AE comps into Premiere, but when all of the scenes need transitions that require all of the comps to stay in AE then Premiere isn't an option.

Basically we'd love it if you could dynamic link AE comps within AE without importing so that multiple users can be working on their separate AE comps simultaneously which are compiled in a master .aep with all of the transitions between scenes.

Does this workflow already exist?

[Mylenium]

At best you could sign up for a Team based workflow, but even this is by all means severely hampered simply by how AE works and will mostly only keep track of the file versions, not the actual content changes and you're making yourself dependent on its sync functions. How well it might work for you is an open question, even more so as multiple people working on the same video files will also require a pretty beefy video server to begin with to allow the data to be temporarily duplicated for each individual user...

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

Most of the time I use Dropbox for group projects. Every artist has their own copy of the project named something like 20-0515 Destiny Scene 4.3.aep, and the AEP's are saved in a dropbox folder so the backups are all there too. Bill may have 20-0515 Destiny Scene 4.5.aep so I would be working on the third shot in scene 4 and Bill would be working on the 5th shot. The project tate is May 15, 2020, the film is called Destiny, and the Premiere Pro project has both files embedded if we are going to use Dynamic Link all the way. A bunch of folks working on the same AE project is a bit nuts because you can always import an AEP into another comp and look at what they are doing without fouling up any of their work.

Frankly, I seldom use Dynamic link for anything more than creating the comp with the trimmed footage because my comps are too complex and take tool long to render. After the Comp is created - then shared through dropbox, I undo dynamic link, label the cut and color it in the Prmeiere Pro timeline so it's easy to find, then the comp is rendered to our preferred production format and shared with everybody through dropbox. 

This keeps the file sizes down, especially if the editor uses Trim and Collect from AE Scripts to send us some footage that is no longer than the shot we need to work on. Transfer times are minimized, you only have to move around the frames that are going to be worked on, everybody has a link to all the project AEP files and if needed Premiere Pro files and it's very easy to keep track of everything.

If the project is huge I might look into the Team based workflow, but the file sharing and file naming procedures would basically be the same. We could all look but only the person assigned to a specific task would be working on that specific file.