Going from Premiere to AE and back...
 

I cut my film in Premiere and have been doing a ridiculous amount of colour fixes and effects work in After Effects. But after watching it all recently I want to make a few changes to the cut involving shortening some scenes, cutting some scenes completely and extending the amount of footage used from other scenes.

The problem is that if I change the cut in Premiere, all of my After Effects settings will be out. Badly out. And some scenes where I want to slightly retime shots by changing the speed, I'll have anasty amount of masks to shift.

Now I'm pretty certain the answer to this is no, but is there an easy way for me to go back to Premiere, change my cut and then make everything fit in After Effects? There doesn't seem to be a way to collapse layers that have masks in AE (I have loads). If I could do that I'd probably save myself a huge amount of time. Or if I could import the effects layers into Premiere and shift them with the cut, that would be perfect. But there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

It's funny. This is my first solo live action short and there really isn't one thing that I've managed to do efficiently...

Jay.

I don't think this is possible. I tried the combo Premiere & AE
once and quickly abondened it. The only thing that you might be
able to do is just work on each individual clip in AE and load that
back into Premiere...

Yep, I've been playing with it for some time now and I think you're right. It's ridiculously inefficient actually. They really should be integrated into one program or have some sort of import/export feature. You can import Premiere comps into AE but it doesn't update if you change anything in Premiere and is more messy than working with rendered footage.

Of course, everyone seems to say that Vegas is what Premiere and AE should be, but I have only got access to the programs I have at work as I just can't afford to buy any more software at the moment (no budget short indeed...).

Thanks,
Jay.

We found this was always a problem when we edited stuff, so what we did is just cut everything in Premiere and only do individual cuts in After Effects and not whole scenes. Actually, I don't think I've ever done a comp for After Effects that's been over 20 seconds. So far it hasn't failed us. Surprisingly, this is possibly the best setup for us since I do special stuff in AFX, and the main editor does his stuff in Premiere and we don't have to mince project files at all.

I am, however, looking into other editing suites to see if they offer anything better.

Jon, that's a great solution and would have saved me an incredible amount of trouble. Wish I'd thought of that for this, but at least I'll know next time.

Thanks,
Jay.