Using Render and Replace - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- One of the most useful options inside of Premiere Pro is the render and replace option, which lets you take a dynamic link composition and swap it out for a rendered movie. Let me show you how. I've closed the current After Effects project and saved changes, and I'm going to switch back to Premiere Pro. Let's choose file, open project, and I want you to navigate to the Project Files folder. Go ahead into the Premiere Pro folder, and open up the project called "Other Workflows." And click open. Now, this project was last opened on a Mac, so it's looking for a different type of GPU. When I click OK, it's going to swap out. Remember, it might come up with the link media dialogue. This is very common when switching platforms or moving files. Again, all you need to do is click the locate button and target a target folder. I'll tell it to look inside of the exercise files here and click search. It looks like it found it, so I can select that so it's active. And click OK. Everything else properly reconnected. Now, inside of Premiere, let's take a look at the sequences. I'll hide this preview area to make a little more room. And, let's go here to this one called "Export." This is a completed version of the project. You can see it has the title, the background, and some stills. We'll learn about this process a little later, but let's go ahead and make an update. What I'd like to do is improve things a little bit here. Let's go with the editing workspace and I'll choose to reset this to the default layout. And, what we have here are some After Effects comps. For example, right here is the title. If I right-click on that, I can choose render and replace. It's right up there towards the top. When you do, a new dialogue will open. You can decide what to do here. Telling it to use the setting of the individual clip, in this case, how is the After Effects project set up. Telling it to use the sequence settings, if you've set this to your delivery format. In this case, DNXHD. Or, if you'd like to choose from your own preset, you can use the different pop-ups here and select from things like the DNXHD media, Quicktime format, MXF OP1a. These are all acceptable formats for broadcast. I'm going to go with my sequence setting here and tell it to match the source. But, if you want to override this, you can tell it specifically what you'd like it to do, or import additional presets that you've made in Adobe Media Encoder. What I'm going to tell it to do is to place the rendered file on my hard drive in the same location as the original media file. Or, if you want to be more specific, click browse. This is a good opportunity to take advantage of the Common Media folder. For example, we can go up a couple of levels here, and go into the Graphic Renders folder. I'll make a new folder here, and I'll name this Renders and select it. Now, any rendered files will go there. You can also include handles if there's nested media. A handle is extra frames, useful for a transition. For example, if there was a clip in here, but the source file had additional frames, adding a 30 frame handle would allow you to add a one second transition if needed. I'll set this to 30 frames. That'll put an extra handle on the front and back useful for transitions. When I click OK, it renders the movie and swaps it out in the timeline. This will dramatically increase performance. Now, if I press play, it plays in real time. But, we have a challenge. That is that we don't have the right format selected. So, let's right-click and choose to restore the unrendered and it swaps back. Now, I need to be careful of what I render. Let's right-click here and choose render and replace. What we need to do is make sure we choose the right format. I'm going to select Quicktime here. From the presets, I'll use the GoPro CineForm Codec. Using the 12-bit preset with Alpha channel to give me transparency information. Now, when I click OK, a new movie file is rendered using the cross platform GoPro CineForm Codec. The file is placed in my Renders folder. When done, we now have a movie file with the embedded transparency and the animation just fine. The high quality 12-bit Alpha give us really clean edges there on that blur transition. It looks really good in fact. What's nice though is if I realize there's a mistake with just a right-click, I could choose to restore the unrendered. Let's go ahead and switch this back for now. And you see it swaps. This render and replace command is relatively new and it's important that you understand the presets and the options. Remember, you can go into Adobe Media Encoder if you need to make additional presets. Maybe you work at a place that's Mac based, and you want to make some lossless presets based on Apple ProRes. In any case, this allows you to use default presets or your own to generate new media files. While it'll swap out the dynamic link comp and give you the benefits of real time performance that comes with a rendered movie, you never actually lose the connection to the dynamic link comp. With just a right-click, you can easily toggle between the rendered file and the replaced file, making it very easy to make updates if you ever need to in the future.