Replied - G

Hey, come on now, y'all! If you've got some cool info on AE I'd love to hear it! Currently, satish's frame server and/or uncompressed renders from Vegas are the only way I know of to work with AE.
Let's hear more please!

Grazie, I too have been thinking about AE, but my reading has me considering Combustion because of the similar features but more intuitive interface. Have you looked at Combustion? I am interested in any information about either of these used with V6.

-jerry

I'm also looking at the same thing Grazie.

Been doing more and more extensive full motion animated video/loops for my clients and I've about exhuasted what Vegas can do by itself.

I would be interested in the answers to these questions as well.

On the script question.... I can't imagine there will be any "commonality" between scripts in AE and Vegas.... completely different scripting environments (and "object model") so scripts in Vegas will not have any applicability to AE (and vice-versa). Was you thinking of some other type of commonality?

I use AE quite a bit, the workflow i use may be slow but it works. Simply render video going in to AE to uncompressed , do whatever it is you may do, then render back out uncompressed. Works perfecly fine for me since I seldom have a long segment going to AE.
Not sure about your audio question ,but you can take the clips audio into AE as well.

Edit, I am using Vegas 5 not 6, but I assume it would be the same

G- I've looked into them both. I have to say that I like Combustion, but that puppy eats up RAM like a kid eats candy on holloween night. OUCH!!!

I tried running it once on a 3.2Ghz 512 RAM EXTREMELY sluggish (Just moving around in it) But - I think that if I were going to choose one, that would be the one. Plus, it comes with some of the Particle Illusion effects in it. - I think AE can use PI as a plugin, but I know that Combustion can. Mind you, if you're already really familiar with the Adobe interface, AE might be easier for you to learn. If you're not - I'd personally go with Combustion, and then you can buy training materials and only pay as much as you would have for AE sans traning materials. (unless things have changed since I looked last).

Dave

I find After Effects interface much friendlier than Combustion's, but that's only my personal opinion. One thing is certain: Combustion's interface has a far more different approach from what we are used to in Vegas. Anyway, both applications rock. I use them both to make my visual effects, but I don't frameserve. I previouly render the clips and then drop'em in Vegas. I've also heard that another terrific application is Digital Fusion, even though I've never tried it before.

I have an old 4.1 Production Bundle version of AE that I used mainly for the nested compositions. Now that V6 has nested timelines, I don't use it so much, but will occasionally for the chroma-keyer function or for other plug-ins that don't have Vegas equivalents. AE also handles Photoshop alpha channels better than Vegas does, so I may use it for that, too.

My workflow has always been: frameserve Vegas to AE, save to uncompressed from AE, reopen in Vegas. Works great! Not sure what you mean by synching audio and video between the two, but I've never had a problem with either frameserved or rendered video between the two losing synch.

Hiyah BS!

"Not sure what you mean by synching audio and video between the two . ."

No, I'm not thinking synching issue here .. rather it is my continual search for a way to synch visual affects to the beat OR texture of the audio - yeah? That type of synching or mapping or interplay . ..yeah?

Grazie

In 3dsMAX you can use a wave file as a data stream to control any parameter of anything. It's a lot of work to get it to do something impressive, especially compared to something like Milk Drop in WinAmp.

But you can also assign joysticks / midi controllers to control any parameter. So you can listen to the song and interpret it in real time through your hands, much like the automation tool in Vegas.

...a way to synch visual affects to the beat OR texture of the audio...

You mean like Sound Keys?

First things first, concerning AE, Combustion, Digital Fusion, and basically any other animation/compositing tool, your workflow will be quite different from what you're used to coming from pretty much any NLE. For example, whereas in most straight NLE work, most of the focus is on arranging your source footage and adjusting the edits to achieve your desired rhythm, working in tools such as AE happens much more on a frame-by-frame basis. We are especially spoiled by Vegas' real-time workflow, giving you audible and visual feedback as you adjust parameters on full framerate footage. This will not be the case for most AE-type tools (save for Apple's Motion, which is solely a motion graphics tool, and not a compositing tool).

When working on projects that need to be worked on in AE, this is the basic workflow I've adopted:

1)Arrange source footage in Vegas. I apply no transitions/fx/etc. to the footage at this point because I'd rather use AE to add the effects. (However color-correction may be the exception)

2)"Export" to AE
>>Option 1 (Best Option IMHO):

This AE plugin takes an EDL created in Vegas and imports it into an AE project as a composition. It makes it incredibly easy to arrange source footage in Vegas to get your timing and rhythm down, and then use that same sequence in AE for sweetening. Oh, wait, I forgot...it's only $5!

>>Option 2: Frameserving

In the cases where you've applied fx, etc. to source files before sending to AE, the EDL import is no longer a viable option. Therefore frameserving becomes the next best option IMHO. Though a great tool from Satish to fill a massive hole in Vegas' own functionality, I personally do not use frameserving that much because I don't like the idea of needing to have Vegas open and using up resources that resource-hungry AE could be using. As such, I am not really experienced with the plugin and the advantages or pitfalls it offers.

I'm going to take a moment to add my entry to the "If Sony wants Vegas to be taken seriously as a professional NLE, then it has to have blah blah blah" list:
What Vegas really needs is Reference Files. I miss these from my FCP days. Avid has them too. Premier doesn't, but really, we're talking about "pro" apps ;P. Satish's plugin sorta provides the same functionality (creating a file recognizable by other video apps as a valid video file, but actually is only a reference to other existing video files, thus saving on space and rendering time), but requires that Vegas be kept open to feed the other program the referenced footage.

True reference files do not need a host application and I've been asking for this since I migrated to Vegas around 2 years ago.

Sorry about that detour there. Back to the task at hand...

>>Option 3: Uncompressed Renders

This is pretty much a "last-resort" option for me if EDL importing or frameserving doesn't work well enough (due to fx or resources). Since you are creating a completely self-contained video file, you do not need Vegas open and eating up resources (big plus). However, you'll need to take the time to render the file (big minus), and also take into account massive file sizes of uncompressed video files (not so bad considering the cost of HDs these days). The big disadvantage here is the rendering time IMHO.

3)Render out of AE and import into Vegas

Once I've finished my work in AE, I render out the sequence to an uncompressed format. The longer the sequence is, the more apt I am to render out to an image sequence, so that if there's a problem during the render, I can just resume the render where the problem occured. Then at least I won't have wasted all the time spent rendering the stuff before the problem occured. Then I import the (image) sequence into Vegas for final touches, mastering, and exporting to delivery format(s).

Some answers to certain questions:

Q:AE has scripting. Will there be a scripting commonality between AE and Vegas? - Grazie
A: AE has some amazing scripting functionality. The scripting largely is based largely on Javascript (with AE-specific methods/keywords/etc. added), so as far as commonality is concerned, if you can write a script for Vegas, you'll be able to fairly easily get the hang of scripting in AE.

Scripting in AE goes far beyond Vegas' functionality tho. Firstly, you can pretty much reference any parameter (i.e. scale, position, rotation, etc.) of any layer (in the current composition or any other composition in the same project), as well as the parameters of the plugins/filters applied to those layers. This means you can basically take the value of a parameter of one thing (a layer, plugin, etc.) and appy it to the parameter of another thing (within the same layer, another layer, another plugin, same plugin, etc.) This allows for the creation of some extremely complicated animation wihtout having to keyframe every change. Incredibly powerful. Even if you're not a scripting genius, AE makes scripting (referred to as "Expressions") pretty easy by using a "pickwhip", where you basically drag a little whip from the parameter you want to affect to the parameter you want to reference. Things can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be, meaning that you can take the straight value of the referenced parameter and use it to affect the value of another parameter, or you can include the value of the referenced parameter and add it to a function or calculation to create entirely new variables.

Q: Can I synch - audio/video - between AE and V6? (...a way to synch visual affects to the beat...) -Grazie
A: Yes, this is possible. However, you don't need Vegas for this. AE (as well as other animation/compositing apps) don't really actively interact with other programs. You basically import source files from other apps in AE, work with them to create your masterpiece, and then render out when you're done.

As far as matching motion/scale/etc. to audio, there are a couple ways to do this:
1)AE Pro has a "Keyframe Assistant" called "Convert Audio to Keyframes" which turns the amplitude value of the left and right channels into keyframes. You can then use these values on any other layer/parameter you want.
2)

Soundkeys is a plugin for AE that allows you to choose a range of frequencies in your audio use those values in other parameters. For example, this could allow you to have one layer affected by the low frequencies and another affected by the highs of an audio clip. Beautiful stuff.

Trapcode also has some other great plugins. Check them out. Rarely do I see something on TV/DVD or at the movies that didn't make use of one of Trapcode's plugins. Awsome stuff. There's also videos and tutorials on the site so you can see what they can do. Exercise extreme caution when viewing in public tho, as others may think you've fallen into a vegetative state as your mind wanders, imagining all the "cool stuff" you could do with these plugins :)

Q: Particle effects?
A: AE has had a particle generator for some time now (at least since v4), and you can also get Particle Illusion for AE (or standalone). AE 6.5 Pro added Particle World, which is a 3D particle generator (PI is only 2D), which allows you to better integrate particles (smoke, sparkles, etc.) into you're 3D compositions. If you want to go beyond what AE's own particle generators can do, check out Trapcode's Particular (another 3D particle generator).

Phew! Ok, so this post kinda ran on a bit long, so I'll stop here (for now) ;)

Wow! - Thanks good people - and to . .. JIVE! PPPhhhoooaarrgghhh . . brilliant post . .THANK YOU! - er . .. I may never well get back to on number of points! - Yeah? But thank you. Can I come and work for you?

Truly learnt a whole lot more from thiis thread.

Great thread,

Great support!

Grazie

Jive,
You sound like you know your stuff AE/Vegas wise. I hope you can help me. I've been using AE 6.5 for effects (love it by the way!) to video clips captured using V6. After I do all the fx in AE, I then render the files as uncompressed AVI to import back into V6. The problem is that although they look good in V6, once I render them to MPG1 or 2 for DVD creation, the AE clips look grainy and even the motion is slightly "jerky" at times . It's frustrating because everything looks fine both in AE and in V6 prior to final render for DVD. Also, even though I render out of AE using the template for DV NTSC (720x480), the clips don't fill the V6 window (there's slight gaps at the top and bottom). Any ideas? Any help would b greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I don't use AE, so I can't speak specifically about its workflow.

But, uncompressed SD video is usually 720x486. When you render this to 720x480 DV, the 720x486 frame may be scaled to the output size. Ugly artifacts result.

Depending on what you did in AE, you may also have some artifacts from interlacing/deinterlacing problems.

Secondly, I think it is sacrilege to do high quality 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 work in AE and then filter the output through 4:1:1 DV before rendering to 4:2:0 MPEG-2. Yecch.

Better to keep the quality as high as possible before rendering to MPEG, it makes quite a difference.

FrankLP*

I think that the main reason for your problem is the fact that Adobe and Sony (Vegas) uses different numbers (definitions) for the pixel aspect ratios.

Joran

Only for NTSC DV, and only for older versions of AE as far as I know.

I thought AE6.5 fixed that, to make it 0.9091 instead of 0.9?

I wish Pinnicle still supported Commotion Pro. It was a very good compositing program that was similar to AE. It came with Primatte, a top of the line chroma keyer. Composite Wizard and Image Lounge let you clean mattes and add light wrap around and match forground element color to background elements. I still use it for compositing green screen footage. HDV keys and composites very well with it. It was much more useful for greenscreen than AE, at least up to version 5.5, the last version I own. It was always buggy on the PC though. It is unfortunately a dead program now.

FrankLP,

As someone else mentioned, one of the problems with renders from AE not fitting properly is you pixel aspect ratio (PAR). While you may be using the right render setting, you might also want to check to make sure your composition settings also have the proper PAR and frame size.

Also, if your renders from AE look fine before rendering to MPEG, then I might suspect that the issue is connected to your MPEG render settings.

BTW, I agree with you, GregFlowers-- Commotion Pro was a great tool, and it was unfortunate to see developement of it stop. To say that it was advanced for its time would be an understatement. It's paint tools, motion tracking, and keying abilities were second to none. AE has only just now begun to catch-up to it in terms of it's painting tools, and I still think Commotion's motion tracking far exceeds the proficiency of AE's motion tracking tools.

Thanks Jive. I'm 99.9% sure that both the ocmposition settings and render setting out of AE are 720x480, but I'll check to be sure.

And thanks for the information Coursedesign. I have to adnmt that I"m pretty green at this stuff...when you mention doing high quality 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 work in AE and then filtering the output through 4:1:1 DV before rendering to 4:2:0 MPEG-2. And that it's better to keep the quality as high as possible before rendering to MPEG. Do you (or anyone) have any suggestions as to what workflow might be the best when using AE6.5 with V6?

I truly love using AE for special fx, and want to continue to use it for that (especially given the $$ investment). I just can't seem to get the renders to maintain their quality going back into (and out of) V6. All your expert thoughts/suggestions are really appreciated. Thanks!!

BY the way all,
The clips that I am using in AE are typically the AVI files that were captured straight off the camera. I use V6 to capture the footage (AVI files), and then import them into AE. I've found that I sometimes I have to re-render the AVIs from V6 as AVI without Open DML (this was a suggested fix on the Adobe sight for an error message "Retrieving frame from video stream (3) (53::34)" where AE can't handling certian AVI's froM Vegas). But for the most part they are usually the first generation of captured video footage. Not sure if this info. helps or makes a difference, but I thought I'd let you know.

I've never used Combustion so this may or may not help much...
Encdoing from 4:1:1 to DVDs 4:2:0 is not it would seem the way to get the best results. I'm in PAL land so don't have this problem unless I'm creating a NTSC DVD from PAL in which case I encode from PAL DV direct to NTSC mpeg-2 and things hold up quite nicely but I digress.
I'd explore options such as rendering out of AE using the BMD 10 bit 4:2:2 codec, free from BMD. The resulting QT mov will go straight into the Vegas T/L. The other alternative would be the Sony YUV codec however I don't think that's available outside of Vegas. Final option would be to render out of AE as uncompressed but file size will be huge. However you could bring that into Vegas and from Vegas render to the Sony YUV codec to save space.
I seem to also recall there's another issue with AE, it's NTSC frame isn't exactly correct, this may have been fixed but if not it'll most likely not trip you up much.
Bob.