Moving from Final Cut Pro X to After Effects

- In case you're not familiar with how to get footage into After Effects, I'd like to explore a couple of common scenarios. Let's take a look at both Final Cut X and Adobe Premiere Pro, and show you how to move your footage across. In Final Cut Pro, you really have two options to get your footage out. First off, the fastest and easiest, is to simply select the clip, right click, or use a control click, if you are on a one button mouse. And then choose reveal in browser. This takes you back to the clip in the project.

From there, you can choose to reveal the clip. File, reveal and finder, or, shift command R. This takes you out to the clip. At this point, you can either memorize the file path, or drag it directly onto the After Effects icon in your doc. If you're working on a Windows system, then you can navigate to the drive, and drag it onto your task bar. And this will add it to the After Effects project. The clip you add will have the same duration as the original media source file.

If you'd like to limit the clip, then go back to the clip in the timeline inside of Final Cut Pro X. From here, you can choose file, send to Compressor. This will launch Compressor, and add the project in. You'll find it listed under the current job, and you can click to add additional outputs. From here, I recommend creating a high quality file, such as one of the Apple ProRes presets, or one of the Uncompressed options. You can then use those files in After Effects, as long as you have the correct codec loaded on your system.

Remember, ProRes can be loaded as a free decode onto a Windows machine, by going to Apple's website, and downloading it, and if you're using a newer version of Premiere Pro and After Effects, you should have the codec loaded by default. Remember, though, it's only a decoder and not the encoder. So remember, if you're on a PC, you'll simply be able to read the files, not create new ProRes files. If you're on a Mac, you should have both read and write capability. Let's minimize Compressor, and return to Final Cut Pro for a moment.

You can also select the clip itself, and with the in and out points marked, you could still choose file, send to Compressor, and it will add it there as well. In this case, either method really works. You could take the entire sequence, or an individual clip and create new media files. Let's quit Final Cut Pro, and switch on over to Premiere Pro.