Pp2->ae7

yagfxg33k

yagfxg33k

Well-known member
I have some footage shot on HDV 1080/60i. I edit in PP2 which includes luma key for some muzzle flashes and I open the project in AE7 so that I can add an adjustment layer and tweak the muzzle flash shots so that there is flash lighting in the area and on the shooter.

First of all, when I bring in any HDV footage into AE, it is just dogging it. It's a real effort to just scrub the timeline. My machine has a 3.6 GHZ Pentium multi-thread processor with 4GB of RAM (boot configured to allow apps access to 3GB, which AE does indeed see). My footage is on my media drive which is a 10K RPM SATA drive that is defreagged regularly. I also have OpenGL enabled. The vid card is an ATI x850.

Can anyone suggest how to improve the performance here?

Also, the clips that I have luma-keyed into my shot, when I take it into AE, the luma key is removed - Any way to overcome that? I suppose I could output uncompressed from PP2 but AE is supposed to understand a PP2 project.
 
I don't have Premiere, but I know those HDV codecs are hell when it comes to using them in AE. Best to use an intermediate or something uncompressed. Might be some other options, but this is what I've read around the intranet.
 
Hmmm - mebbe I will re-do it in FCP as DVCPRO HD and see if I have better luck that way. I was hoping the integration between AE and PP2 would have been a viable workflow.
 
After you capture your footage, put it into an intermediate codec for editing. Get out of MPEG as soon as you can, and then when you bring that into AE, your workflow will be much smoother.
 
Anything uncompressed like lossless
I have an HVX200 so I shoot dvcprohd to start with, but I export elements out of AE as avi lossless for editing.
 
Ive always has the best luck when incorporating visual effects, to take out only the small amount you need the effect for. I always render Quicktime with the Animation Codec. Then I open that new file in AE, do the work I want, and re-render as another Quicktime with Animation codec. Then, I open that clip in my NLE and find the spot where it came from and either add it above the track, or cut the track in the right places to slide it in place so it fits to a frame.
 
One question - if you run footage thru QT/Anim it's supposed to end up uncompressed. Based on that, is it safe to say that no matter how many times you re-encode something in this fashion, it will never degrade?
 
yagfxg33k said:
One question - if you run footage thru QT/Anim it's supposed to end up uncompressed. Based on that, is it safe to say that no matter how many times you re-encode something in this fashion, it will never degrade?
Click to expand...


I would suppose this is true, but I don't see why you would go that route. Unless you are making very long clips, I wouldn't overwrite them, just create new ones. If storage is an issue, back up the ones you don't need to DVD.

Also, I like to have previous versions available to me. There's been many a project where I tweaked and tweaked and the result was overdone. Having an older render to work on has saved my arse. I also save my work as many different versions as stages progress, so I can fall back on previous projects as well.
 
Well I was not intending to double compress heh heh - Was just curious. I also tend to make incremental saves so that I can revert back to previous versions. Learned that the hard way from years of doing Lightwave where everything you do is destructive :)

So I did the AT/Anim route last night and that worked fine. I did have one quirk though. In my sequence I have a total of 9 frames that need to be adjusted. My first attempt was to just render out the whole shot of about 880 frames. But the QT/Anim hung up at about frame 775 or so. As such I just rendered out the needed frames, edited those in AE and brought them back into PP and all of that worked fine.

Thanks much for all of the help here!
 
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