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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Anyone compositing 4K raw in After Effects?

JR Monteiro

JR Monteiro

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I am adding a few effects to an indie film I am editing in 4K on my MBP. So far everything is going amazingly. My MBP's graphic card in Mercury Playback Hardware capable. When I right click on a clip and replace it with a "After Effects Project" it takes me to AEP and puts my clip on a 4K the timeline and I work with it as usual. When I am done i save it and exit out and return to Premier where the un-rendered clip now appears. If I render it in Premier it takes a long time but it comes out looking great but I am wondering if it could be rendered in After Effects more efficiently while I continue to work on my Premier project. Any thoughts? If so, what format do I render it in? I don't see an R3D option in the Render settings. If there isn't one then I have to render again in Premier and I have saved nothing.
 
You could do it either way. It will take long both ways. If it were me I would just leave it as is in premiere and let it render the timeline for preview. That will pretty much make a proxy. then when your ready to do your final render don't select use preview in the render options. That way you'll still be using the original .r3d to render your final output.

If you really want to render out of After Effects I would use either ProRes if your on mac platform, Or Quicktime with the "Animation" codec. If your short on space I've been using Quicktime with photo Jpeg codec set to 100 quality and I just keep it 4k. Lots of options
 
I did my last music video with all comps in AE in 4k, then nested and reframed in 1080p sequences. Great experience...and get this...on a 2006 MacPro without CUDA.
 
There are 3 levels of interoperability that I use between Pr and AE:

1. Dynamic Link. This is the right-click, Replace with After Effects Composition. This is a live link between AE and Premiere Pro - any changes I make to the comp will show up immediately in the Premiere Pro timeline. Make a change in AE, switch to Premiere, and the change is there. Leave both programs up and running for fast, near-realtime changes. Great for roughing out the details, and great for checking how a comp will cut together with surrounding footage. It's RAM intensive, though, and longer comps may not play back real-time without rendering.

2. Using a Proxy. There are 2 ways of accomplishing this - either by rendering the dynamic link in the Premiere timeline, or by creating a proxy file in the AE comp. As you mentioned, rendering in Premiere can take a while. I've found that the proxy file method in AE seems to be a bit faster to render, since it's handling multi-cores better. But either method works, and it's still easy to go back and make changes. If you like, I can point you through how to create a proxy in AE. It's something you can toggle on/off, and re-render as necessary.

3. Replace with a movie. This is where I replace the AE comp in the Premiere Pro timeline with a self-contained movie, either a QuickTime or MXF file. (Render the file from AE, Import the new media into Premiere Pro, and option-drag it onto the Dynamic Link in the timeline.) I usually only use this step when I absolutely need the comp to play back real-time in Premiere Pro, and I'm pretty much done making changes. However, there is still a way to make changes if necessary - right-click on the clip in the timeline and choose "Edit Original." This will look for the AE project and comp that created the file, and open that up, and even place the comp in the render queue to replace the current movie file.
 
I use dynamic link all the time for 2 and 4K compositing with RED files. My workflow is pretty simple. After linking from Premiere, I basically do the whole composite in AE and then do a prerender of it in PRORES (HQ or 444 depending on need). This prerender then sits on top of the main comp timeline in AE and I turn all of the other layers off (leaving them on will slow renders considerably).

This is efficient in a few ways. AE is generally a quicker, more stable renderer than Premiere and a prerender there will allow you to to have a "final" version while still keeping the option for tweaking later with the layers below. Back in Premiere, you'll find that the render of the dynamic linked file, being a prerender already, is very fast...and it keeps the editing experience very fast...the way it should be.

Make sure you work in at least 16bit in AE. Its not a huge performance hit but the stuff will look way better.
Also, the prerender solution also works really well for proxy files in AE. Red is still kindof clunky for rendering. Sometimes its just better to knock out a few prores prerender variations of the R3d files in order to get the comping done and then swap them for the red files for the final render.

Hope this helps.

-Paul
 
Paul Schneider said:
I use dynamic link all the time for 2 and 4K compositing with RED files. My workflow is pretty simple. After linking from Premiere, I basically do the whole composite in AE and then do a prerender of it in PRORES (HQ or 444 depending on need). This prerender then sits on top of the main comp timeline in AE and I turn all of the other layers off (leaving them on will slow renders considerably).

This is efficient in a few ways. AE is generally a quicker, more stable renderer than Premiere and a prerender there will allow you to to have a "final" version while still keeping the option for tweaking later with the layers below. Back in Premiere, you'll find that the render of the dynamic linked file, being a prerender already, is very fast...and it keeps the editing experience very fast...the way it should be.

Make sure you work in at least 16bit in AE. Its not a huge performance hit but the stuff will look way better.
Also, the prerender solution also works really well for proxy files in AE. Red is still kindof clunky for rendering. Sometimes its just better to knock out a few prores prerender variations of the R3d files in order to get the comping done and then swap them for the red files for the final render.

Hope this helps.

-Paul
Click to expand...

That's good advice Paul. Thanks.
 
Joseph Coleman said:
You could do it either way. It will take long both ways. If it were me I would just leave it as is in premiere and let it render the timeline for preview. That will pretty much make a proxy. then when your ready to do your final render don't select use preview in the render options. That way you'll still be using the original .r3d to render your final output.

If you really want to render out of After Effects I would use either ProRes if your on mac platform, Or Quicktime with the "Animation" codec. If your short on space I've been using Quicktime with photo Jpeg codec set to 100 quality and I just keep it 4k. Lots of options
Click to expand...

Now here's a great piece of info I didn't know about. Thanks for that.
 
By the way, is 16bits enough for the comp ? Is there a difference of quality when using 32bits float with R3D files, if you render to 4K Prores 4444 ?
 
I'm not sure you would see much difference between 16bit and 32bit in regards to RED footage. (anyone have first hand experience or a comparison?)
Now, depending on what effects you're using, 32bit can make a big difference. Depends on the project.
 
Karl Soule said:
There are 3 levels of interoperability that I use between Pr and AE:

3. Replace with a movie. This is where I replace the AE comp in the Premiere Pro timeline with a self-contained movie, either a QuickTime or MXF file. (Render the file from AE, Import the new media into Premiere Pro, and option-drag it onto the Dynamic Link in the timeline.) I usually only use this step when I absolutely need the comp to play back real-time in Premiere Pro, and I'm pretty much done making changes. However, there is still a way to make changes if necessary - right-click on the clip in the timeline and choose "Edit Original." This will look for the AE project and comp that created the file, and open that up, and even place the comp in the render queue to replace the current movie file.
Click to expand...

There should be a choice in ae to just render and repalce the dynamic link automatic and still have the edit orginal option. I have missed you could still use the edit original. Good advice.

I did finally playback a dynamic linked klipp (3d tracked simple text) and played it back realtime at 1/4 in premiere. Even did play it back at 1/2 but thats if im lucky. Most time it
drops frames at 1/2. This is because my raid is not so fast yet...
 
Not much work, I found PNG is a great replacement for JPEG100%, almost same size, but can have 16bit/channel and alpha.
 
I did all the effect in AE in 4K for my web series pilot, Magehaven. http://www.youtube.com/magehaven

I'm looking for an ACTUAL VFX super and artists to make the rest of the series not look like the pilot. :) A Red rocket was a must for this. I used the R3d raw files inside AE and premiere.

It was slow, but the last time I used AE, was 10 years ago and it was was slow with SD footage, so I thought that's how it was supposed to work.

I could notice the difference between 16 and 32 on my torch scenes (about 3 minutes in) The gradients would band at 16.
 
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