Integrating with After Effects Using Adobe Premiere

Using Adobe Premiere Pro can have its drawbacks, but its seemless integration with After Effects makes it a fantastic solution for adding graphics and animation.  These past couple weeks I’ve been using it to edit videos for clients at Blueprint. Getting started was a bit rough as the program was a little different from software I have used in the past, and it has taken a while to get used to, but the “Dynamic link” feature that is built into it, allowing it to link to compositions created in After Effects with just a few clicks, sparing me the hassle of exporting and rendering first, has been nothing short of awesome.

There were several occasions when the contrast of the videos had to be raised to make the background black, but a balance had to be achieved so that brightness and clarity could be maintained, in spite of the raise in contrast. This could not be achieved using Premiere’s effects panel alone. I realized that the footage would need to be taken into After Effects to achieve the desired balance. The footage, however, was already mostly edited and in different pieces accross the timeline of the sequence. I had no desire to re-edit the footage but this looked to be the only option, as I would have to bring the original footage into AE, achieve the contrast balance, and then link it to Premiere.

Enter another great feature of Premiere: “replace with After Effects composition.” By right clicking on the desired piece of edited footage, I could select this feature from the pop-up menu and Premiere would automatically send the edited footage to After Effects and link itself to it, allowing me to freely adjust the footage without having to worry about re-doing my edit.

Comments welcome!