Dynamic Links Require Long Render in Premiere

[Martinnel]

I'm just trying to find out if this is because of the age of my Mac (specs below). I would like to bring my Character Animator scenes into Premiere and play them at full speed as quickly as possible; I'd even give up preview resolution. But they always seem to require a long, slow render before they'll play well at all. Is there a sequence setting that would be more native to the files I'm importing that would make them play nicer, faster?

Martin

Early 2009 Nehalem MacPro4,1, 2 X 2.6 GHz Quad-Core

OS 10.11.6

Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB system drive

32 GB RAM

ATI Radeon HD 4870 GRFX Card

Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K, Driver: 10.8.2

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 018, v. 12, Build 224

Adobe Media Encoder CC 2017.1.2, Build 11.1.2.35

Adobe Character Animator CC 2018 v.1.1.1

Avid Media Composer v. 8.6.1

[alank99101739]

Personally I now render each CH scene into a H.264 (MP4) file then load that MP4 file into Premier Pro.  It requires me to do everything in CH (camera pans, backgrounds, etc). But I find it much faster overall. I then add title dubs, background music etc in Premier Pro.  I also do any AE scenes (for special magic) the same way - I use dynamic linking to get the puppets into AE and in sync, then export a MP4 file to load into Premier Pro.

You can export PNG sequences - the only way other than dynamic linking if you want transparencies to work (that I know of!).  For my laptop, PNG is faster than dynamic linking. But exporting a MP4 file plays full speed in Premier Pro, so while I have to manually re-export the MP4 files, overall it gave me the best experience.

But this is what I do personally - I know a lot of people use dynamic linking instead. I just found it too slow on my hardware.

[Martinnel]

Thanks again for responding. I was hoping dynamic linking would speed things up, but I think you're right about speed. I did find (partially through other kind members of this forum) that I could send the puppet to Media Encoder and then export with a codec that offered an alpha channel. So far I've just tried cineform. This gave me a relatively quick encode that looks good and has a complete alpha.

Martin

[alank99101739]

Cool! I had not discovered that encoder before!  "QuickTime" / "GoPro CineForm RGB 12-bit with alpha" is what I tried (and it worked).  220MB .MOV file instead of 27MB .mp4 file, but it was a movie file with transparency intact!