Dynamic Workflow between After Effects & Premiere
How to Send & Link Premiere and After Effects Projects
Make a New Premiere Project
- Create a New Project and Browse for a new Location like the Desktop or your personal external drive. Just stick with the default settings.
Working with Footage in Timeline
Steps
- View in Timeline and Program: Drag clips from Project Panel to the top portion of the Timeline Panel. Then you can play it in the Program Panel to view it.
- Trimming Clips in Timeline: You can also select the clips themselves on the timeline and move or trim them by dragging them around or dragging the edges of each inward. In the toolbar you will find the Ripple Edit Tool very helpful. If you use it to drag the edge of a clip, the other clips will adjust accordingly instead of being overwritten.
- Razor Blade Tool: To trim, you can also put your playhead over where you want to make an edit and select the Razor Blade Tool in the tool bar, then make a splice and delete the remaining clip.
- Effects: You can also add an effect to a video clip. Go to Effects Tab > Video Transitions > Dissolve > Cross Dissolve. Then drop it onto the edge of your clip and double click to change duration.
Editing Clips in Program Panel (making subclips) (my preferred method)
Steps
- Double-Click the clip in the Project Panel and it will open in the Program Panel.
- Drag the playhead in the Program Panel to where you want to start the clip. Press “I” on the keyboard to Mark In. Then move your playhead to where you want to end the clip and press “O” on the keyboard to Mark Out. You can also click on the brackets in the bottom of the Program Panel.
- Then go to the top menu bar and click on Clip > Make Subclip. Then name your clip accordingly. That subclip will then appear in your Project Panel.
- You can then go back to the original clip and continue making other Subclips.
Working with Audio
Steps
- Linking: You can unlink audio from video by toggling the Linked Selection icon in the Timeline Panel. By doing this you can delete the audio if necessary or vice versa.
- Timeline Editing: You import audio the same way and drag it into the bottom portion of the timeline. You can move it around accordingly by dragging it. You can also cut it if you need to by pulling in the edges or using the Razor Blade Tool in the Toolbar.
- Effects: You can also fade audio in and out by going to the Effects tab in the Project Panel and choosing Audio Transitions > Cross Fade > Constant Power. You then drag that effect onto the edge of your audio clip. Double click it to change its duration.
- Waveforms: Drag the height of the track in the timeline down so you can see the waveforms.
- Keyframes: If you drag the height of the track big enough, you can then see the option to set a keyframe to manually fade in the decibels. Click and drag on the horizontal white line on the audio track to change the decibel amount. Then place your playhead where you want to set a keyframe and click on the small diamond between left and right arrows.
- Mute or Solo: You can also click on the M to mute the track or S to solo it.
Changing Sequence Settings (including size and frame rate)
Steps
- First you open Premiere and then go to File > New > Sequence. Then just click OK.
- Next click on the Timeline Panel in order to have that Sequence selected. Go to Sequence > Sequence Settings.
- In Sequence Settings, then click where it says Quicktime DV NTSC next to Editing Mode and change it to Custom.
- Then you can adjust the size to 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720, whichever you prefer.
- Then change the Pixel Aspect Ratio to Square Pixels (1.0)
- Next change Fields to No Fields (Progressive Scan) (this is unless your footage is interlaced, then you can leave it)
- You can also adjust Frame Rate here to either 24, 29.97, or 30.
- Finally click OK. Now your sequence should be the appropriate size for the final project and when you import the video into After Effects later, it will have the correct size.
Sizing and moving individual imported videos that may be varying sizes
Steps
- Import your videos.
- Drag into the timeline and Click Keep Existing Settings if it pops up.
- Double click the video from the Timeline. In the top left Source Panel, you will see the video and other tabs below. Click on the Effect Controls tab.
- In this panel, toggle open the Motion section. You will see the Scale option that allows you to resize your video in the right-side Program panel.
- Next to the Motion section in the Effect Controls tab, you will see an icon that looks like a bounding box. If you click on this, it will give you an active bounding box over your video in the right-side Program Panel. Then you can move the video around and scale it in the Program panel.
- Remember when you scale these videos up to fit the 1920×1080 or 1280×720 composition, some of the image may be cropped in order to fit, which is fine. Hold shift while scaling in order to keep it proportional.
Exporting Movie and Possible Compression
Steps
- You go to File > Export > Media. Make sure Export Video and Export Audio are checked if you want both. If your file ends up being too big, you can change the format here from Quicktime to H.264.
- Then click Export at the bottom of the panel and it will save it where you saved your Project File or wherever you set your Output.
- You can also choose to export your file through Adobe Media Encoder by clicking on Queue. This will allow you to add a Vimeo or YouTube preset to your final export.
- You can also import a Premiere Project file into AE and vice versa if you are going back and forth.
Using Adobe Media Encoder
Steps
- Once you add the file to the Queue from Premiere, it will show up in Adobe Media Encoder Queue.
- Click on the yellow text under Format and it will bring up another panel called Export Settings
- Under Format, choose H.264
- Under Preset, choose ‘Vimeo HD 1080p 29.97‘ or ‘Vimeo HD 720p 29.97‘ or ‘Vimeo HD 1080p 24‘ depending on chosen frame rate
- Then click the little green arrow in the top right of the window to render.