Passing video between Vegas and AE

TeetimeNC wrote on 8/17/2006, 10:55 AM
Vegas/AE Experts,

I'm starting to see more uses for After Effects in my video workflow. I would appreciate a critical review of the approach I'm using for transferring clips between Vegas 6.0d and AE7. Currently, all my work is in SD. For each of these two scenarios, do my assumptions seem correct?

SCENARIO 1
Video clip has been created and/or altered in Vegas, and needs to go to AE for further work - render clip as NTSC DV for xfer to AE. It will be returned to Vegas for compositing and final rendering to MPEG2 for DVDA.

SCENARIO 2
Video has been created and/or altered in AE, and needs to go to Vegas for compositing and rendering to MPEG2 for DVDA - render using HuffYUG for xfer from AE to Vegas.

Also, for footage that is created initially in AE for eventual use in Vegas, is there any advantage to setting color depth at anything higher than 8 bits per channel?

Any other tips you have for moving work between these two tools would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jerry

Comments

rs170a wrote on 8/17/2006, 11:28 AM
I've never used AEefore but your question reminded me of a frame rate discrepancy between the two apps that might be an issue. Seems that AE runs at 29.97 while Vegas runs at 30,000/1,001 fps (29.97002997002997...).
The Subtle, yet major, bug in Vegas and OT (Sort of) Frame rates threads get into this in a lot more detail.
Check either thread for a link to SpeedMangler (Brazilian in the first and John Cline in the 2nd one) that fixes this issue.
This issue arose during Vegas 4 and I have no idea if this was fixed in subsequent versions or not. I'll leave that to an AE expert for confirmation.

Mike
ForumAdmin wrote on 8/17/2006, 12:14 PM
Importing/exporting .png image sequences is the best way to go when roundtripping to AE.
BrianStanding wrote on 8/17/2006, 1:34 PM
SCENARIO 1:
I would frameserve out from Vegas to AE using Satish's free frameserver plug-in (available from www.debugmode.com). If you're comfortable using After Effects' interface, you might be better off doing your compositing work in AE, rather than Vegas (after all, compositing is AE's strongest point). For final rendering, I think I would probably just encode to MPEG-2 directly from AE. Both Vegas and After Effects use Main Concept's MPEG encoder, so you probably won't see much quality difference between the two. Otherwise, see below for tips on going back to Vegas.

SCENARIO 2:
Unfortunately, there's no way as of yet to frameserve out of After Effects to Vegas. So, you're stuck with rendering out a file. If the sequence is short and you have plenty of disk space, render out as an uncompressed AVI to avoid artifacts. Otherwise, HuffyYUV or any lossless codec will likely be fine. Re-open the file in Vegas and edit away.

I'm curious about which would take up more space for longer sequences: a PNG still image sequence, or an uncompressed AVI.