From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects

Using After Effects projects natively in Premiere Pro

From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects

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Using After Effects projects natively in Premiere Pro

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- Now, if you don't want to render and create new intermediate files, you can actually use an After Effects composition directly inside of Premiere Pro as a piece of footage. Let me show you how. What you'll need to do is move the items from After Effects to Premiere Pro. There's a couple ways of doing this. First up, you can select a Comp and choose Edit Copy right in the Project Panel. Then if you switch to Premiere Pro and make a new project or open one from before like the documentary project we created, you'll see that you can paste that right into the Project Panel. There it is, it brings a folder over with the media but gives you the actual Comp. That can be dropped into a sequence and you'll see that it should play. Now in this case it's not doing the blending mode correctly. You'll see that it tried to bring this as Layered Files over so it brought the actual sequence. And it took the two different pieces and brought those back into Premiere. But all of the things like Key Frames did come across. So, you can deal with the different Key Frames and have that movement if you wanted to. In this case, the Vignette simply didn't make the jump. Alright, let's delete that away and do this another way. I can also choose File, Adobe Dynamic Link, Import, After Effects Composition. This allows me to navigate to that project. Let's go to the downloads folder and I'll go to my folder there with the exercise files and select the After Effects project. Now, if I select one of the compositions, I can target it and click OK. And it comes in as a piece of footage. You'll notice that, that has everything in tact and it may not play in real time the first time through but on my system it didn't actually drop any Frame. So it treated it like a piece of rendered footage. You can do the same thing with the Media Browser. Navigating to any particular folder that you have. I'll just go to my downloads folder and navigate to my exercise files. And when you select the After Effects project it opens it up. You can now see all of the contents of that project. It may take a second as it connect the project but it rebuilds all of the links and will show you each composition. Now, you can step into a folder, grab any Comps that you want and just right click and choose Import. And they'll be added to your project. Now, very simply they can go right into the Timeline. And like the ones that we imported one at a time you'll see that the clips come in. Now if you get a Drop Frame indicator like I see here, that might tell you that it didn't play back smoothly the first time but usually on times two or three the Frames should be cached and you get smooth playback. If you don't see the Drop Frame indicator just click the Settings Icon here and turn on the option to Show Drop Frame Indicator. That'll make it easier to preview what's happening and really get a good idea of how those After Effects Comps are working. This particular relationship of being able to bring in Comps without having to render first is unique to the relationship between After Effects and Premiere Pro. But it is one advantage. And of course you can always select things and press Command or Control E. It'll switch you back into After Effects, open up that item and allow you to make tweaks. So if I wanted to refine the mask there a little bit and adjust my vignette, here we go. When I click close and I save my work and switch back to Premiere it updates. There's that change. Maybe I decided that I wanted to adjust the color. Edit, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and I'll apply a black and white effect from the color menu. There it is and maybe a curve adjustment. There we go. And when I close and save this, I can switch back to Premiere, it updates. So this gives you a lot of flexibility. Not only can you refine the look of the image, but if you needed to, jump back over, lasso all your Key Frames and holding down the option key or ALT Key I can stretch those out to slow down the shot. Save my work and switch back and the adjustment is handed off from After Effects to Premiere Pro. Now, you'll find more about working with After Effects and Premiere Pro together in the online Library, this is just one sample workflow. If you are using another editorial tool just follow the advice we gave in earlier movies about rendering out video files. And those will work just fine.

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