Steal a feature from AE

[RebeccaOsborne]

I'm looking for some workflow advice.  Here's my experience and I'm writting this as I'm open to change he way I work.  I've been using Premire for a few years now, primarily to create bespoke animations for big clients here in the UK, NHS, OFGEM etc.   I know I should probably be using AE, as it's feature packed, but I really don't need ANY of those features. I'm just moving predrawn PNG's / Animated GIFs etc.  I have used AE for several projects, but in all of them it felt slow to create, with Premire being much more intuitive, plus I can organise effectively so it remains uncluttered. In AE it's just oodles of layers, which when expanded is scroll, scroll, scrool and an overload visually.   In AE I can't seem to achieve that quick "flow-state" feel when creating, manipulation objects as I do in Premiere.   With what we create, the only thing which is "lacking" in premiere is the ability to assign and lock an object to a parent layer, so when I move the parent layer the object remains in position (on the parent layer), and they move together.  I know I could nest, but we often build anmation foregrounds and backgrounds as long image files, so we can parallax scroll.  When you nest layers, it crops all the image layers.  If I could have AE's parent child feature and null object (I use to ground objects in a scene and utilisae as a pseudo-camera) in Premiere it would be totally perfect.  Any advice gratefully received. 

[RebeccaOsborne]

Foregive the typos, my glasses are somewhere ! 🙂

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Rebecca,

Sorry about the workflow situation. AE has a new feature that allows you to flow much better without spinning down so many twirlies - it's called the Properties panel and is contextual according to the selected layer you are working with. See if it might work for you.

If nesting in Premiere Pro is not allowing for the full raster of the underlying image, you can change the Sequence Settings to an "oversized" frame size that may assist what you're trying to do. I do this all the time in creating 2D motion graphics. Sorry if I am not visualizing exactly what you are wishing to do. A screen movie may help me to assist you better. Is that possible?

Thanks,
Kevin

[MyerPj]

Hey Kevin, sorry to interrupt so, please just consider this a bounce. I've been looking for the Properties Panel, it sounds absolutely great, is it in the shipping version or still only in Beta. I'm using AE 23.3 and I've concluded it's still in beta. Is that correct?

[Kevin-Monahan]

It's in 23.4. It's the bomb. I demo'd it at NAB.

[RebeccaOsborne]

Hi Kevin,

Thank you for your advice.  I'm currently working on a 4.5 min. animation for Birmingham University.  I started in AE but when it bogged down visually I became frustrated and quite quickly rebuilt in Premiere.  I'm now as far as I was in AE so now I'll check my AE version and have a look at this "property panel" gorgeousness.  If it works for me, I'll continue in AE.  I'll also have a quick mooch at the sequence resize to "oversize" in Premiere, the images are 8 or 9 scenes wide so each "layer" is 15400 x 1080. Exciting, and again thanks for the guidance.  Ooh by the way, interesting side note.  Last year I was building a project locally on my computer WHILST using a linked Synology NAS drive functioning both as a quick file transfer method between asset creation computers/build computers in our studio AND as backup asset repo (networked on CAT7). Issue was when rendering (in Premiere/AE/Encoder), the render output was ALWAYS glitched at some point, even though ALL files we're local on the build computer. Tried many different settings. In the end, the solution was to consolidate the entire project on my computer to a different location (with no association to the NAS).  This solved the render problems straight away.  Hope that makes sense and helps others who may have been experiencing a similar thing.  Thanks again.