AVID > After Effects and Digital Fusion

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aldudeau

New member
Hi guys,

I'm soon to begin editing a DV film. I'll be cutting it in Avid and then doing the effects in digital fusion and color grading in either fusion or Color Finesses in AE. Basically I am worried about how I would structure the workflow.

Once the cut is done, I'd want to export the induvidual clips into AE or DF for color matching. I'd then continue to DF for effects and then back to AE for the final grade. How would I best do that? I mean would I have to export each clip from Avid as a separate file and grade it? Which codec would I use, or would I go with image sequences? etc, etc.

Basically I'm looking for info on a good relatively painless workflow that will not affect the video quality and will not be finicky (exporting induvidual clips from avid and processing them through Pro Coder would take ages). Any hints?

I'll appreciate any comments,
Cheers,
Alex Mizin
 
I'm not familiar with Digital Fusion, so I can't give you an end-to-end workflow, but I can tell you that the two best ways (IMO) to get lossless footage out of Avid is to export as a Quicktime Reference, or as a tga or tiff sequence. I'd assume that DF will accept those. Then out of DF, just keep it as a lossless format. Quicktime Animation codec, or tga/tiff sequence into AE. Then keep it uncompressed again (Quicktime Animation, tga/tiff seqence) out of AE and back to Avid.

Hope that help, or that someone familiar with DF will chime in.
 
Thanks for the info.

Yes, I'm thinking of just using image sequences. Will that be ok for interlaced footage? I'm going to de-interlace right at the end. Also will the framerate/timecode stay synched with the sound, if I re-import the image sequence back into Avid?

Cheers
 
You'll be fine with image sequences and interlaced footage.

Exporting an image sequence will not preserve timecode in the exported video. Likewise, when you reimport an image sequence after you're finished, it won't have the original timecode that the video in Avid has. But you will have the original clip in the sequence that you can just replace with the newly imported file so syncing shouldn't be difficult. If you create a new video track and lay the imported footage on top of the old footage then you can keep the timecode accessable via the original video track.

Does that make sense? I just woke up, so I hope so. :)
 
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