From the course: Collaborating on Video Projects with Creative Cloud

Collecting media to hand off to a collaborator with After Effects

From the course: Collaborating on Video Projects with Creative Cloud

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Collecting media to hand off to a collaborator with After Effects

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- If you're using Adobe After Effects, it has its own project manager, and unfortunately, if you've placed After Effect's comps into an Adobe project using Adobe dynamic link, well, they're not included in Premiere Pro's media manager. Now, we do have the option to do the render and replace, which is always a good idea. You'll learn more about that workflow later. But, let me show you how if After Effects is involved, how to take advantage of its media manager to gather up your files. In our project folder here, I do have a folder called AEP, and a simple logo animation. Double click to launch this project. After Effects should launch, and the logo animation will open. There we go, I see that the file opens, and we have a simple animated logo that contains a graphics source file and some footage, and sound. What I can do now is go to After Effects and from the file menu, choose dependencies, and I've got a couple of options. First up, if there's things that we didn't need in the project, I can choose to remove unused footage. This is going to go through and remove anything that was not actually used in the project. This is a useful option if you have a lot of experimental things that you brought in. Maybe different source files and textures, and you just want a clean house. Getting rid of stuff that didn't actually make the cut. The next option, reduce project, allows you to actually select a composition. So, you can select something here, and then choose to reduce it, and it's going to remove anything that wasn't in the selected comps. What I'm going to do here, is choose another choice. Now, that is consolidate all footage. This will scan multiple drives, and pull things in, if needed. If you've got things stored in several locations, this will move it all together. The last option here, though, is what we're really looking for. And, that's going to be the ability to collect files. It'll ask me to save the project, and now I can decide what to collect. I can choose all of the comps, or only the ones that I've selected. I'm going to go all comps here, if you just want a report so you can make a list, you can choose generate report. But, I'm going to go with the option here to collect everything. Reduce project will apply that same reduction and take things out that wasn't actually used. Now, what we need to do, is choose where we put this. Additionally, it tells me that some effects are used, so, I can include any comments or notes here that are necessary. I would suggest that when we collect this, you put some notes, so, people know more about the project. When you're ready, click the collect button. Now, target a new location. I'm going to target my portable drive that I'm going to send off to another editor, and I'll choose save. Everything is collected, and you'll see that the new folder opens, and it's stored on the drive. If we double click on this to open it up, it will switch to the new project. And, I see that everything did, indeed, come in. This made it easy for me to know that everything did, indeed, work. And I can see the new file path. Now, this particular folder is ready for archive. You'll also notice that it generated a report. This is quite useful because it tells the person a lot about what was gathered. It gives them information about the file, where it was collected, what was gathered, the file size, and if there were any particular effects used. In this case, these are all built in effects, but if I had used some third party effects, and the other person didn't have the correct plug-in, this would help them decide if they needed to add some additional features. This gives them a lot of information about the project, and this report is quite useful. It also makes an index of all the files that were collected. The benefit here is that if you were using both After Effects and Premiere, you might see that some material was copied twice. Once for After Effects and once for Premiere. This is because it's a lot easier to then hand off to the people who need it. But, if you were doing your final archive, you might actually be able to reduce some of the dependencies here by merging the media folders together. That's relatively complex, but if you did the merge on the hard drive, you could then update After Effects to find the new location for the file, and everything should work out. Or, go ahead and bite the bullet and just archive each individually. It'll make it a bit easier and give you some safety, in case you ever need to restore the project.

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