Boris RED 3GL will work as a plug-in for Vegas 4.

You can use After Effects with VV. After Effects isn't part of Premiere anymore than Photoshop, Illustrator or In Design are. They are all products that Adobe make but you don't need one to use the other. After Effects allows for almost any output you want to render to up to "film resolution". You can easly work in After Effects and bring your work into a VV edit , so as far as workflow goes there isn't any issue.

Did you have something specific you were doing or wanting to do that made you ask the question?

I use Commotion Pro.

*Premiere has after effects, pinnacle has commotion what does vegas have?*

The ability to output to either, IMO faster, and in many cases with money left over for refreshments whilst rendering.

Filmy is right, After Effects works quite well as a standalone effects processor, that, if you're careful, will work just fine with Vegas. I have an old version of Boris FX (3.55!) that includes a standalone effects application that I have also used successfully with Vegas. Can't speak for Commotion or Lightwave, but I suspect they have similar capabilities.

HOWEVER, AE is more tightly integrated with Premiere in that:
- you can import Premiere projects directly into After Effects;
- Premiere and AE share a number of plug-ins, so you can use the same effect in either, and;
- Premiere and AE have access to the same video codecs, so a file saved in AE will ALWAYS be compatible with Premiere.

As some earlier posts pointed out, Vegas has some pretty slick compositing features built in, so, depending on what you're doing, you may not need anything else. Going from Vegas to After Effects is very easy, you can save an AVI or QT file or frameserve directly to the program using Satish's nifty plug-in (www.debugmode.com). (BTW, Satish has been considering an adaptor that would let you use Photoshop or After Effects plug-ins in Vegas, but needs to hear from more folks who want such a thing).

Going from After Effects to Vegas is a little trickier, particularly since Sonic Foundry's superb DV codec is only available to Vegas. Most people report best results by saving from AE to an uncompressed AVI file. That's fine if you're dealing with short segments, or have unlimited disk space, but obviously poses problems if you're dealing with long files.

I, for one, would like to see Sonic Foundry open up their DV codec so other programs (like After Effects) can use it to create DV AVI files. Maybe in version 5.0....

Hope this helps.

You can frame/audio serve via signpost files from many Adobe applications using 3rd party (freeware) plug-ins. That will allow import to Vegas uncompressed without intermediate file space being used. You won't gain quality if your sources inside Adobe apps have DV (etc) but you won't lose out to lesser DV encoding engines.

You're right about frameserving out of Premiere. In fact, the latest version of Satish's plug-in has a Premiere-compatible version.

However, I can find nothing similar for After Effects. Satish tells me that the way AE handles rendering is substantially different than NLE systems, and the programming is just too tough.

If you find something that proves me wrong, please let me know, as it would solve a number of problems for me!

>>>Going from After Effects to Vegas is a little trickier, particularly since Sonic Foundry's superb DV codec is only available to Vegas.<<<

I am not sure I agree that it is 'tricky' going from AE to VV. If you do a 'render as' in VV it is a bit more easy as far as staright forward goes. But the options are the same as far a codecs. Pretty much any codec available in Windows is available as a render option in VV or AE (or Premiere for that matter). You mention the SoFo DV codec in specific but if you render to the MC DV codec, or even the MS one for that matter, it will still import into VV with no problem. You can render out to uncompressed or QT or whatever your heart desires the same way you can with VV. (Although AE has the ability to export a Flash file now as well, VV can't do that yet) The lucky thing though is that AE is NOT an NLE so you should not be rendering out a feature film, only shots you have worked on - effects shots or title sequences or what have you. One would think if you are doing the main edit in VV you would simply output the same format from AE. if you are editing in DV with VV you simply render out to DV from AE and you bring that into your project. If you are doing a PTT that sequence should not have to be re-rendered at all.

As for frame serving, other than really really wanting to use the SoFo DV codec I am not sure why one would want to frame serve out of AE.

But than again - RdaVid still hasn't answered my question as to if there was some specific reason the question was asked in the first place. What does RdaVid need to do? Maybe we are all barking up the wrong tree with our answers.

Filmy,

I've had really bad luck transcoding from one DV codec to another (MS to SoFo, SoFo to Canopus, etc.). Lots of pixellation on movement, etc. Have you found a better method?

I agree that for a 10-20 second title sequence out of AE, uncompressed video is no big deal. Run it up to a 5-minute effects or animation sequence, and those files get really unwieldy. When I was using Canopus products, I could easily render to a Canopus-codec DV file and save a file that was roughly one-fifth the size. Premiere could then use the AVI file with no further transcoding to final output.

Sure, I can save to the MS DV codec, but then I'm transcoding to the SoFo codec (time-consuming and with all that potential for errors) when I print to tape. All I'm saying is, why do it twice? If SoFo's codec were available to After Effects (like most video codecs are), none of this would be necessary.

FWIW, think the sofo DV codec is built into the program code, so pulling it out into a separate module that could be accessed by windows might be a more difficult chore then it seems.

If there's a prob. with some dv codecs going to the sofo version, what about some of the lossless avi compression codecs/methods out there? At least you'd retain the 4:2:2 info to let Vegas sample all the data.

RE: frameserving, I'm not a big avisynth user - there's a huge amount I don't know - but would think that it would be possible to go from ae to vegas, think I recall reading of others doing it. I do know you'd need the avs import dll (ReadAVS.dll) & then vegas will import avs files just fine.

"I do know you'd need the avs import dll (ReadAVS.dll) & then vegas will import avs files just fine. "

Only in conjuction with VFAPI. Readavs.dll allows VFAPI to "wrap" the avs script as a fake avi which Vegas can load. It is a great pity, but Vegas can not read an AVS script directly (to the best of my knowledge). Heck, even Microsoft wm9 will now read an AVS, but not Vegas.