Color Grading/Correction Adobe Premiere vs After Effects and Additional Questions

[Josh Bass]

Can you seriously do that?

As for features. . .surely premiere/AE have some kind of masking that you can animate/keyframe similar to power windows if that's really important to you.

[Duane Adam]

Yes you can.

Editing Video in Photoshop CS6 on Vimeo

[Josh Bass]

That is so totes amazeballs.

[Tim Kolb]

Premiere Pro has various matte effects, but not what a colorist would expect for a "power windows" sort of application...AE has versatile masking and of course SpeedGrade has very flexible masking tools as well as spot correction, etc. Colorista is quite good. I love the power of SpeedGrade (even as it transitions to a more "Adobe" interface...), but to make a correction on the PPro timeline, Colorista is convenient and fast.

SpeedGrade will feed an external monitor or scopes through an SDI output module on a Quadro card.

As far as whether to use AE or Premiere Pro, it comes down to preference for many people. Premiere Pro has the scopes...but AE has the color management. Depending on your workflow it can be a bit like having to choose arms OR legs...

[Josh Bass]

Pretty sure I found a reference to scopes in AE in an online tutorial. Unless I'm wrong?

[Battle Vaughan]

Color Finesse 3, included with AE, has a great set of scopes. You have to select "full interface" to see them.

[Josh Bass]

Bingo Bango Bongo!

[Tim Kolb]

Yes...Synthetic Aperture has scopes... AE itself does not.

As long as you want to apply Synthetic Aperture, you're good to go.

If you use RGB curves, or anything else to do color correction, or any alteration in AE, there are no "general purpose" scopes that apply to the comp generically like in Premiere Pro, where you can use any effect to make adjustments that you choose and use the scopes to see all changes.

[Josh Bass]

Ah. I see the distinction. That is goofy, especially how much I see AE touted across the web for color correction! What a strange feature to leave out. Or maybe not. . .since there's a $150 scopes plugin. . .

[Soumendra Jena]

SO, whats the workflow ?

Finish video editing in Premiere Pro, export the project to mp4 or something and then import the mp4 to After Effects and do the color grading and then render all again on After effects ?

[Battle Vaughan]

Using Dynamic Link (which has been improved in CS6) you don't have to import and export as the files are simply linked between the apps and you can work on a PPro sequence in AE and it will appear in PPro in it's revised form automatically. In truth it is sometimes balky but that is the workflow Adobe recommends.

[Soumendra Jena]

You mean, finish video at Premiere Pro, dont close it, click on dynamic link and get the video to After Effects, then apply colour effects, then again use dynamic link on AE and move project to PP and finalise render ?

[Battle Vaughan]

Edit: Quick answer in next post, but you may want to watch this video for a quick overview of how the linking works in CS6. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-prem...-premiere-pro/

Here's a video tutorial that will explain dynamic link better than I can --- The Power of Dynamic Link | CS6 & Creative Cloud Feature Tour for Video | Adobe TV The speaker gets carried away with the details, but watch the whole thing, he finally gets to the point: dynamic link lets you easily move material from one program to the other without rendering and fuss.

Basically, dynamic link lets you open PPro and Ae, or PPro and Encore, and treat them as parts of one big program, rather than thinking of them as two distinct programs that you have work between. You can send compositions or clips between the open programs like any other asset, you don't have to render and copy them first.

The CS6 help files have a good discussion on this also. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premiere...4A6F6A465.html

[Battle Vaughan]

Originally Posted by Soumendra Jena

You mean, finish video at Premiere Pro, dont close it, click on dynamic link and get the video to After Effects, then apply colour effects, then again use dynamic link on AE and move project to PP and finalise render ?

Let me answer your specific question. take a clip in your PPro timeline, right click on the clip and select "replace with ae composition." AE will launch if it is not launched already, the clip will appear in the AE browser panel. Put it on the AE time line, apply your filters, effects or whatever, alt-tab (mac: ctl-tab) to go back to PPro, and there is your clip on the timeline replacing the original, with all the AE process in place. Simple as that.

[Walter Brokx]

I must admit that most of the time I color grade in PPro using Colorista II.
Premiere has all the scopes and it saves me from using 2 programs.

However I do use dynamic linking for other stuff that needs to be done in AE. And then I grade the embedded comp in Premiere. (Which creates a previewfile as well after rendering, so it's easier to watch it all)