How to bring a scene into After effects most effectively

[orlandop98057891]

Hello everyone, 

I have just about finished creating 5 scenes about 5 minutes long each in character animator. I have six characters walking and talking, backgrounds, music, and sound effects. Now its time to put all the scenes together in after effects to create my first episode. This has been a lot of work. I use import and dynamic link. I bring in everything that shows and thats when I have problems. I skip every two frames and a quarter like Ok Samurai suggest and it will barely play. I know that it has to render but that will take forever and will that happen evertime I make a change. Whats the best way to do this? I feel like there has to be a better way to keep moving. somebody help!! 

[CoSA_DaveS · Accepted solution]

Five minutes is quite long for a single scene over dynamic link. At 24 fps, that's over 7000 frames. The problem is that if you jump to a time late in the scene in AE, say frame 5000, Ch has to render frames 0-4999 before you can see 5000. It's called a "run-up". It works this way because what happens earlier can have an effect on later frames.

Dynamic link is convenient since it avoids rendering, and allows you to make changes in Ch and see them flow into AE automatically. To minimize the run-up time, you can use shorter scenes. Or, instead of dynamic link, render out to a sequeunce of PNGs or a movie file, and bring that into AE instead. Downside is that you'll have to wait for it to render (and re-render if you make changes), upside is that it will be much faster in AE.

[orlandop98057891]

Thanks for responding. I have been playing around and I found out that when I import the files via dynamic link one file has the whole scene in it. I still can't get them to play correctly. Though it's considerably better. You said send them over as movie files. That seems to be the best choice. 

What are all the choices that I have. I just don't know. I'm confused. I really didn't understand your answer fully. I'm new to this stuff. I just started using all the adobe products in Feb. I'm trying to only do what I need to start and get better as I keep creating.

[oksamurai]

File > Export shows all your available options. Personally I use dynamic link with lower settings like I showed most of the time, and I have to wait a little bit but it eventually works. I would also recommend checking out File > Export > PNG Sequence and WAV and importing that into AE as a PNG sequence. That will be significantly faster but more of a "baked in" file - you'll need to re-render the whole sequence if you make any changes in PS, AI, or CH. Hope that helps!

[orlandop98057891]

That helps, I can't get the wav file to line up with the png seq. Why? Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

Make sure your framerate in AE is the exact same as the framerate in CH.

[orlandop98057891]

Thank you. Bringing in PNG sequence seems to work well. I will stick with that for now. May move on to more complicated stuff in future episodes. Thanks for the help. You guys keep me moving and you are appreciated.

[orlandop98057891]

I had wrong fps. Sorry.