Exporting adobe character to Adobe premiere

[Fendiwhippet]

Here's the story.

I have a finished character project that I would like to put in Adobe Premiere.

I do export by adobe media Encoder and then it fails to change the format.

I talked to support and they say it's character's file and it just won't work.

Adobe support did a png and wav file ok but I don't really like that. It's too many files and I can't change the duration of the length because of all the files.

Thanks for any help.

[oksamurai]

Have you tried dynamic link with Premiere? If you open Premiere, import the .chproj file, and select the scene, does it show up in your Premiere assets? That's how I would personally do it.

[Jeff Almasol]

Also, in AME, what's the specific error message that appears when you click that "Failed" link?

And, if you quit AME, Character Animator, and other Adobe apps, wait 30 seconds (so that the background dynamiclinkmanager process quits as well), then relaunch AME, does retrying rendering of the queued Character Animator scenes work (unsure if you need to duplicate the queued item first or not)?

[Fendiwhippet]

Hey Dave,

I just checked into that method of using the dynamic link. It only works with an after effects file.  I'm trying to import my ch into premiere. When I put my ch.proj file into premiere they work at first then all the files go offline and just won't play.

Danielle

[oksamurai]

Are the files on a local hard drive, or on an external drive or cloud-backed folder like Dropbox? If so does moving them to a local drive help? I've seen issues with that and dynamic link in the past sometimes.

[Fendiwhippet]

My files are on my hard drive so I guess that isn't the problem.

When I looked at the dynamic link, it just offered after effects as a import so I guess ch is not a option.

Danielle

[mariak38518758]

This solved the issue for me thank you. I was trying to tranfer the character animator file from a portable device/external drive. Once I transfered to a local drive worked like a charm. Thank you!

[Farish]

I am speaking with Support right now and they say that Premier does not allow for Character to upload into Adobe Premier Pro. I feel like there are two different stories in the community of support with Adobe Staff. Can you please help? I have now lost my entire characters scene, and I am being told that it is basically my fault since I uploaded it to premier pro...

[Jeff Almasol · Accepted solution]

What are your versions of Character Animator CC and Premiere Pro CC? Are they the latest 2018 versions (i.e., version 1.1.1 for CH and version 12.0.1 for PR)?

Premiere Pro CC 2018 can import a .chproj file from Character Animator CC 2018 so that you can select a scene to import. You can also drag the scene from Character Animator CC 2018's Project panel and drop it into Premiere Pro CC 2018's Project panel. This is standard Dynamic Link usage, as described in Adobe Character Animator Help | Export: Render a movie or broadcast a scene live

If you have different versions of Character Animator and Premiere Pro (e.g., Character Animator CC (Beta) and Premiere Pro CC 2018), that won't work via Dynamic Link.

I've reached out to our Support staff to clarify. Sorry about any confusion.

Thanks.

[Dan Ramirez]

If you would like to use your CH scene in Premiere, it's probably best to just import it directly into Premiere like oksamurai said(though it appears you're having issues with that). Of course, you should be able to export a movie in AME and import that into PR, but that should be an optional step. And again, it appears you're having issues with that as well.

Adobe's support shouldn't have told you it just won't work. It's possible there's a bug interfering with your workflow. If that's the case, we'd like to figure that out so we can fix it.

Dan R.
CH QA

[Fendiwhippet]

Hi Dan,

I did put the ch scenes directly into premiere and they worked at first. When I closed the program and came back the next day, all the ch files were offline. I did this twice with the same results. I would like to use this method. It's one less step then to change the format.

So I should be able to use a ch file right into premiere? 

[Jeff Almasol]

And just to confirm, you are using Character Animator (Beta 6, version 1.0.6 as shown in the About screen) and Premiere Pro CC 2017 (11.1.1)?

[Fendiwhippet]

This is my about.

So far today the AME is working and changing my projects into MP4 files. But...... Character is not working properly. I want my background to be transparent and so I changed to transparent in the scene but when the MP4 makes the background black.  I'm not sure what to do. I shut down Ch and then rebooted and I've tried 3 video and all the backgrounds are black.

Do you have ideas?

[oksamurai]

Video export will always make the background black, alpha isn't supported with mp4 or other AME formats.

PNG sequence + WAV or dynamic link are the ways to do that.

[Fendiwhippet]

So importing it to AME is not an option.

How can I get my ch scenes to work properly in premiere?

Thanks for helping me with this.

Danielle

[Dan Ramirez]

You're probably using the H264 encoder which creates an MP4 file and this doesn't have an alpha channel. If you want an alpha channel, you need to pick a format that allows an alpha channel.

Here's a list of formats that support an alpha channel:

List of video formats supporting alpha channels - Blog - Digital Rebellion

And the way to enable the alpha channel in AME is pretty hidden. Here's a thread with a description of how to do that:

Alpha Channel / Media Encoder Question

[Fendiwhippet]

Hey Dan.

When I am exporting a scene out of Ch, the save as type drop down is only H.264?

Can I make the changes in AME?

Thanks, Danielle