VPro12cs -project interX to Adobe After EFX please

videoITguy wrote on 9/9/2012, 3:20 PM

A lot has been made of the SCS pre-announcement of one special feature built-in to the coming release of VPro12cs Edit - the ability to open a .veg file in Adobe After Effects. Thus the excitement over what happens in Vegas may no longer have to stay in Vegas!

I quote from others: begin of quote: " The more I matured as a producer and NLE editor, the more I have had to collaborate with other post production professionals, resulted in that the more that using VegasPro as the NLE of choice became a hindrance to our team.

Team Operations forced me to move out of Vegas for certain tasks or projects - for example:
- I use After Effects to import a LUT at the end of my project
- I use Avid and other NLE's a lot NOW for various import and export of projects from other apps.

This forced me to come up with exotic workflows, with gargantuan uncompressed files, gamma shift workarounds ....I really love VegasPro, and all of us here know that it IS as good as any other NLE out there, EXCEPT when it came time to colaborate with other software. NOW, for me, the Project Interchange announcement is HUGE and effectively keeps me in Vegas longer, and this fact makes me a better customer for Sony! " -end of quote

The question I have is how could this new feature be implemented. I have maintained that the cross-exchange usage of Vegas is seriously hampered by transcode in codecs - and has little to do with saving projects that could be opened elsewhere. What gives SCS???

The quote above makes it clear that the codec of choice between NLE's has been forced as uncompressed - BUT it should be opening and rendering ProRes, Avid, Edius, etc.

How would saving a cuts only composite structure .veg project in VPro12cs Edit be a good thing for opening in AfterEffects??? I hardly ever structure a multi-layer composite in SONY VegasPro without usage of masks, color and other effx applied from the Sony libraries. So I continue to wonder "Is it not the render to good lossless codecs that is our goal to NLE transfer - AND NOT the project structures???

Please help me understand - those of you who use After Effects in your workflow.

Comments

NickHope wrote on 9/9/2012, 8:43 PM

I don't fully understand your question with regard to codecs, but watch the V12 video and pause around 0:50 to 0:55. They've added import/export to more formats. For Adobe it's listed as "Premiere/After Effects (*.prproj)". I don't know much about AE but don't native projects have a .aep extension? Seems like basically the "After Effects" has been added on for marketing reasons and because it can(?) open .prproj files, but really what we're talking about is a translator to Premiere Pro. It remains to be seen whether it translates just cuts and tracks, or more detail such as FX etc.. I wouldn't expect too much of it.

videoITguy wrote on 9/9/2012, 10:11 PM

For Nick Hope: I think your comments about seeing the Premiere Editor project extension is appropo. In other words (we have to consider CS6 packaging) as TO the workflow we might expect-- it IS -
save a cuts only edit in .veg file of VegasPro 12 cs Edit albeit with a multi-layer timeline being opened by Premiere CS6.

Second step is apply CS6 edits with video and audio efx inside Premiere and use the normal toggle within CS6 between Premiere and After Effects (I forget what they actually call the toggle) but something that keeps CS6 open as a packaged system of applications) -maybe memory resource intensive.

What I meant by inter codec correspondence between NLE's is it would be nice if Apple would give up on controlling writing ProRes only with their system. Let Vegas read and encode ProRes codecs and you have great interoperability between Vegas and FCPX - i.e., the PC and Mac platforms that are all over professional editor's desktops.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 9/9/2012, 10:18 PM

Quite sure Vegas does support reading of Apple ProRes, just doesn't write it.

Dave

farss wrote on 9/10/2012, 2:10 AM

I managed to open a Vegas project in AE ages ago using XML as the project interchange mechanism.

The very concept is pretty daft, there's somethings you just wouldn't want to do.
I'm no AE guru but to the best of my knowledge AE only permits one clip per layer. Not that AE cannot handle 100s of layers but that's not something you'd want to do just to get a project into AE.
TBH I cannot really understand why you'd want to open a project from any NLE in AE, I doubt even Ppro does this, the outcome would be a mess.

Now opening a clip in AE, sure, maybe but a whole project, no way.
It'd be just as messy as trying to open a Vegas audio project in Sound Forge.

What would make sense is say bouncing a Vegas project into Ppro and from that using AE. Adobe have been pushing that workflow themselves for years, even to Vegas users.

Bob.

Tim20 wrote on 9/10/2012, 2:54 AM

I don't think AE is really intended to be used for effects across a complete project at once. Unless you were working on a very high end workstation it would drive you nuts. Even then I can't fathom doing work on a complete project at once.

It is meant more to do specific work/fx inside a scene which is probably no more than 2-3 minutes in length.

Even yesterday I went outside of my better judgment and edited a green screen scene together in vegas and moved it into AE. One part had green splash on the hood of a vehicle so I had to mask it out to key. Then I had to keyframe the mask out in the next cut and add another mask for the handheld green screen then key the mask away again. For a one minute scene it proved a little counter productive.

But even with that I am wondering how being able to open a vegas proj in AE would have been a time saver.

And here is another example of how that ability just doesn't make sense. Eye replacement. You see that one used all the time and to do it you have to motion track one eye then build mulitple layers in AE and render it out. Then back into AE and repeat for the other eye. This kind of work has to be done on a clip by clip basis.

Now if you don't understand much about AE and its purpose I would suggest you watch one of Andrew Kramer's tutorials @ Videocopilot.net. He is probably the god of AE and did the opening credits on the last Star Trek movie.