If you'd like to see the commercial that resulted from this project, click here.

I'm primarily an offline editor, so when it comes down to it, I need to make sure someone else down the road can repeat my cuts. Months down the road, I need to be sure I can resurrect a project for a client and make a quick revision. Traditional editing requirements make repeatability a matter of course. Everything must be timecoded so that everything can referenced further down the production chain. However, the world of the Desktop has allowed some cracks in the TimeCode Mantra...

"QuickTime?" "OK." "PICT?" "Sure." "Hey wait, what about TimeCode?" "Ah, don't worry about it, After Effects doesn't care about TimeCode!"

True enough. After Effects, Photoshop, Commotion, Avid Cinema, they don't care about the repeatibility of TimeCode. They work in a magical world, a world without boundaries, a world allowing you to be completely creative. But you care, right? You want to make your life easier as well as maintain your sanity. Come on in, sit down and get comfortable, I'll show you around.

Art Director/Designer Justin Leibow and I created a spot for the Chrysler & Plymouth dealers in the Philadelphia metro area. The spot was offlined using an Avid Media Composer, and was finished using Adobe After Effects. The process we made to get an uncompressed spot laid to tape was cool, and it worked flawlessly. Thus it becomes the basis for my discussion.

The Right Tool for the Job

Your Avid is your editor; it's fast, it's easy to use. So when I'm using it in concert with After Effects, I use the Avid's strengths where they're best employed and AE is used where it best shines.

So in my example of the Women of the Year spot, I did the offline using the Media Composer. I worked in such a way as to make my life getting to AE simple; as much as possible I tried to keep every shot as independent as possible. Take a look at the screenshot of my first offline...

Note:For some reason I cannot explain, I ended up with V1 being empty. You know how it is, early on in your edit, something is on V1, then later you remove it for some reason, then you forget about it and keep working. I don't know what happened, but work with me here.

What you see is how I envisioned this edit, knowing that there would be type and other animations to help things along. You can see I layered things using standard Avid tools, Superimposes, PIPs, and used a lot of dissolves to fade things in and out. Experience and faith helps here. I'm not at all thinking of using simple superimpositions in the final comp, I plan to use AE's Transfer Modes and other compositing tools. But for the quick offline, the superimposes give me the general idea of how images might interplay.

My next chore is to sit myself down and make some notes on a printout of my timeline... it looked a little something like this...

The reason for such painstaking notes is to help myself recreate the timeline when I get to After Effects. It seems like a pain, but its very helpful.

Then I made a copy of my sequence, and started preparing myself and my timeline for After Effects. I removed all effects: All dissolves, all superimposes and PIPs, I replaced all the motion effects with original speed material. All I'm left with now is a stack of independent clips.

Transitions

Next comes the key to how I use the Avid with After Effects. I go through the above timeline, and select each shot, making sub-sequences of every shot in my timeline. I actually use Auto-Patch to help me here. I load something, anything, into the source side, then turn on Auto-Patch and turn off all tracks on the record side. This way, when I turn on V1 on the record side, V1 on the source side gets patched to it and my record-side track monitor moves to V1. Then I hit MARK CLIP, and SUBCLIP, and I have a sequence containing only that one clip. When I'm done going through every clip this way, I have a bin which looks like this...

The names of these clips become the names they have from here-on-out. So when going through the subclip stage, give names which will hopefully make some amount of sense. The real genius of this step, however, is the Start bin heading. Those times you see are the Master Timecode locations of each of those clips. Neat, isn't it? I either print this bin or take a screenshot of it, because I need those timecodes when I go to After Effects.

So, now Export. Select all those subclips in the bin, and choose File->Export. Use QuickTime, Source Compression, and use a size of 720x486 (720x576 for PAL). Let the Avid name the files for you with the ".MooV" extension. After I export I use a great shareware renaming program called A Better Finder Renamer to replace the .MooV extension with an indication of the compression used. "Braided.MooV" therefore becomes "Braided_70."

Important consideration: In order for my magical plan to work, it is important to have my edited sequence have a start timecode like 01:00:00:00. This is because of how we're relying on the timecode to tell us where shots line up in AE. If you start your sequence at 03:33:02:00, you're in trouble.

When I work in After Effects, I try to be as neat and tidy as possible. If you think you can create some convoluted project organization in your Avid, After Effects gives you the power to create a royal mess. If you're not careful in AE you can get very lost in your own project. Have you ever resurrected an AE project later and asked yourself "What was I doing here? I can't figure this out!" We've all been there, we sympathize.

First, I create a folder for the project. Inside that folder I create another called "footage". For this job, I created another folder inside that called "AVR70". This way, when I received the uncompressed footage, I could differentiate it from the AVR70 material.

An alternative is to simply use the name extension you added to keep sources differentiated (I'm talking lo-res vs. hi-res here) and simply create a "footage" folder. Then, when you're ready to re-render your AE project at your high resolution, simply replace the lo-res footage with the new hi-res using the Replace Footage Command.

You get the idea. So now, armed with my footage imported into After Effects, my timeline notes, and my bin printout with the Start Timecodes listed, I start making my comp in AE (setup, of course at 29.97fps, 720x486 D1 pixels (25fps, 720x576 for PAL)).
Since the Avid timeline started at timecode 01:00:00:00, this corresponds nicely with AE's comp beginning at 00:00:00:00. After a few minutes of recreating the clip positions in time, applying opacity keyframes to match Avid fades, we have our offline completely raring to go in After Effects.

So now you or your favourite After Effects designer can use After Effects for all that it's best suited for: Animate your type, make some beautiful composites, whatever.

We ended up making a few editorial changes after we got this far into the process, but fear not! The method made it easy. After I made the changes in Avid, I made the subsequences, exported the clips and told the designer at what time in his timeline to insert the footage. It was nice 'n easy.

The Uncompressed Difference

For this spot, AVR77 was not an option for us, we didn't want to make any compromises by using any compression whatsoever; we wanted the full-on quality. However, the workflow we started out with allowed the segueway into a uncompressed world simple and painless...

Remember that bin with all my clips, ready-made for export? I made a sequence of all those sub-sequences, and then made an EDL for a quick and dirty linear auto-assembly. This edited master was then "dubbed" to a DDR, then we used Animaq(tm) software to create PICT sequences on the Mac from the DDR. The PICT sequences of each shot were then brought to the After Effects Mac, and we simply replaced the footage. It worked very well. After this, we did the final render as a PICT sequence, transferred that to the DDR, then copied that to D1.

Done.

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Copyright © 1999, Wes Plate