Importing footage from FCP

[Vampiresoup]

I have a few shots in a FCP sequence that I want to doctor but I dont want to have to do the ENTIRE clips associated with them. I want to import them into AE. Any ideas?
It's a 24p timeline. I dont' have the cash for Automatic Duck.

So far all I could come up with was to make a seperate sequence with just the shots I want to doctor and render an MOV of them. Then import that into AE. Problem is, it seems to lose quality. If this is my only option what setting should I use to import to AE?

Is there any other way, other than automatic duck, to get FCP and AE to work together?

Thanks for any help!

Andrew

[Matt Grunau]

When you are rendering your shots-to-be-tweaked, they will look like they are losing quality if ou putting compressor/codec on them. Render out as an uncompressed (or before I get poinced on, lossless compression) and make sure you set up your composition in After Effects to be exactly the same as your source footage.

.mov (uncompressed or with the lossless Animation codec), .tiff, .tga (again both have lossless compression you can use,) or .avi uncompressed. They key to making sure you have a seemless workflow between apps is to always workin the same paramaters.

You are working 24p (though you didn't specify advanced or not) you will need to set up your AE comp correctly, as well as being sure the footage is interpereted correctly by AE. Then is should be a simple matter of tweaking, exporting, and using bback in FCP. I do that sort of thing all the time. It should work fine for you.

[Vampiresoup]

thanks man. Yeah I forgot to say it's 24pa. Will that make a difference? I cant seem to find a lossless codec in FCP. I'm using the in house fcp compressor since I dont know how to use the 'compressor' program.

[Matt Grunau]

thanks man. Yeah I forgot to say it's 24pa. Will that make a difference? I cant seem to find a lossless codec in FCP. I'm using the in house fcp compressor since I dont know how to use the 'compressor' program.


24pa will be even easier. The difference between 24p and 24pa is basically you can work with 24p in a 60i project, and have no worries about meshing it with other movie files/animations. 24pa is meant to be treated at a full out 24 fps video, just like film. There are different pulldowns to achieve this. If you are gonna be working in a 24pa, you will be working pretty much in a strictly 24 (or 23.97) fps timeline.

If you can't find a lossless codec, then when you Export, create a .mov and make sure the compressor is set to none. You should have the option of things like Sorenson, sorenson 3, and others. You should see the Animation codec amoung them. They should be listed under options in the render dialoge box. There is no "compressor" program, compression is an option you enable before you output.

[Vampiresoup]

thanks man. I just set it to no compression on both FCP and AE and things worked out fine. It had to re render it in FCP when I dropped it back into the timeline after I did the effects in AE but I'm assuming that's because it had to render it back to DV.