reducing AE project size with a lot of stock footage

[kietthai]

I have a project that has a lot of stock footage in it. When I collect the file it's about 9 gigs. Unfortunately this is causing a lot of transfer problems now that everyone is working from home. All the stock footage is anywhere from 5-30 seconds, but only 2-5 seconds are used in each. We have about 10 projects that are all different and huge this. I'm looking for suggestions on how to reduce these projects so it's not such a beast to transfer.

One thought would be to render out only the section of the stock clip being used. Then bring that new shorter clip back in and replace the longer clip with it. That sounds logical, but a drag and drop replacement of the original clip won't be so easy since the clips are not the same length anymore. You'll wind up having to move keyframes around and hope things don't mess up. Also layers are in 3d and parented to each other, so it's not so easy to just redo layers separately.

Any one else have suggestions? Is there a way to collect the file and tell after effects to only gather a portion of a clip?

[Rick Gerard]

Every time I share footage in a group project that is going to be trimmed I do two things. First I add 10 to 30 frames to the head and tail of each shot so we will have some handles for the editor to work with. Cutting on a blink isn't always as effective as cutting just before a blink so I want handles unless the final edit is locked.

The second thing I do is Pre-compose the footage, and IF the project is to be shared I immediately select the Pre-comp, add it to the Render Cue (Ctrl + Ctrl/Cmnd on a Mac) where I have the standard production format we use (like IFF sequence or ProRez 444 with alpha) set the Render and replace option and the file destination to dropbox (or your shared folder) and let Render Garden do the work of creating an H.264 proxy if the client needs it, and the shared file. Everybody has got the footage in just a few minutes, I didn't have to stop working because of Render Garden, and when the shared AEP is saved all the links still work except for the original footage files which other users can ignore. It takes about a minute to set it up and you never have to worry about it again. There are other BG rendering options but RG works the best for me and it paid for itself in the first two hours on the first day I used it.

Save the AEP with a version number to dropbox and everybody also has a copy of it and a copy of the backup files. 

[kietthai]

Thanks Rick, these are all great ideas for new projects as we proceed. If you have any thoughts on how to trim older projects,  I would love to hear them. I know Premiere has a way to trim clips as a way of archiving projects. I wish there was something similar in After Effects. Now that everyone is working from home I keep joking that we should make all projects just have vector graphics, solids, and text. Ha!

[Rick Gerard]

The only easy and free way I  know of would be to jump into the old AE projects, pre-compose the footage layers and render the pre-comps to a suitable production format. You might want to look at Trim and Collect from AEScripts.com. I have never used it, but it looks like it would require you to still open up all of the shared projects, run the script and then render and save a version of the AEP with the new links.