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Music Video Workflow

Not sure how to go about this. I will be spending a lot of time on color grading etc, as this video is for a competition. I prefer to color grade in After Effects, and I will also be doing some slow motion editing with Twixtor. On the other hand, I will be using Neat Video in some shots, and I only have that in Premiere Pro.

So how should I organize my work flow when editing between Premiere and AE. The main problem, is that normally I edit by scene, and then I will open the PP project in AE and color grade the entire thing. However, this being a 4min. video, it will be a montage of varied clips where one clip may be completely different from the next, and will require completely different color grading.

I have considered color grading all of the like shots in groups before doing the actual editing, and then editing afterward and applying NeatVideo as needed.

Thoughts or suggestions?
 
There's gonna be a lot of footage you're not going to use, so it'd be a waste of time to color all of it first. I would recommend just editing it in Premiere first, then export to AE and grade just the clips that you actually use, clip by clip.

Although, why not color grade in Premiere?
 
I figured you had a good reason, I was just curious. :)

One thing I still can't figure out, though -- why does this have to be any different than your normal workflow? When you export a Premiere project to After Effects, you still have everything separated clip-by-clip, no? If not, you should, cuz you can. Which would mean, either way, you're coloring each and every clip, apart from other clips. You can do copy/pasting of effects, but ultimately, each clip gets its own coloring, regardless of whether you're in Premier or After Effects.
 
When I bring the project into AE, it imports everything, but as I usually edit by scene, I just drag the whole composition into AE and edit it. I have never done it clip by clip in that situation. How exactly would I go about doing that? If I drag each clip, will they be edited the way I had them in PP?
 
Here's a nice tutorial on the different ways to go from Premiere to After Effects -- https://www.video2brain.com/en/lessons/sending-work-from-premiere-pro-to-after-effects.

If you highlight all of the clips in your Premiere timeline, then right-click "replace with After Effects composition", then all of the clips will remain separate from each other in your AE composition.

You really should be coloring each clip by itself, anyway. I'll admit that I often will copy/paste the coloring from one clip to another (if they're different clips of the same shot, and the lighting is the same), but I definitely don't recommend using the same coloring for an entire timeline or composition (for the very reasons you mentioned earlier).

Good luck with the project! :)
 
If you highlight all of the clips in your Premiere timeline, then right-click "replace with After Effects composition", then all of the clips will remain separate from each other in your AE composition.

If this is the "dynamic linking" method, then do be aware that you'll decimate your performance, as dynamically linked AE projects will no longer render multithreaded... at least last I heard, which was CS6.

Might not be a big deal for grading, but definitely for more complex compositions.

CraigL
 
It's much easier to copy the edit from Premiere (ctrl-C) and paste it into a AE composition without using dynamic links. You'll have the exact same thing than what you have on PP.
 
Meaning what, it'll slow things down?

TheArtist might be better able to elaborate, but yes, if you use the "Dynamic Linking" method, when AE renders, it will essentially only use one thread (or one core) to process one frame at a time. If you render from an AE native project, you can specify the number of cores to use, so it can render as many as 8 frames (on a high-end consumer CPU, more on multi-CPU systems) simultaneously.

I don't use AE (I'm a HitFilm user) so his description might circumvent that, the main loss as I understand it is you can't re-edit in PP and simply re-render, you'd have to re-copy/paste into AE, right TheArtist?

CraigL
 
TheArtist might be better able to elaborate, but yes, if you use the "Dynamic Linking" method, when AE renders, it will essentially only use one thread (or one core) to process one frame at a time. If you render from an AE native project, you can specify the number of cores to use, so it can render as many as 8 frames (on a high-end consumer CPU, more on multi-CPU systems) simultaneously.

I don't use AE (I'm a HitFilm user) so his description might circumvent that, the main loss as I understand it is you can't re-edit in PP and simply re-render, you'd have to re-copy/paste into AE, right TheArtist?

CraigL

That sounds about right. And from the way the OP described their intended workflow, I think The Artist's suggestion is actually best. :)
 
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