OK folks,

I have worked out a bit of a clever workflow for something and I want to just check with the geniuses here that it makes sense.

Basically I made a CGI film and I am trying to do an edit at higher than 8 bit so I can master to 10 or 12 bit for Digital Cinema.

Because it's CGI it's all been rendered in LightWave 3D as 16bit OpenExr files. We comped those in Fusion to make 8bit TGA files.

We edited the TGA files in Premiere to get the final movie. However, obviously that's only 8 bit; and the need has now arisen to get a 12 bit Digital Cinema master.

We could re-do all the Fusion comps to get 16 bit TIFF files, but Premiere CS3 will only load PSD (Photoshop files!) at 16 bit. It doesn't support TIFF or EXR or anything else.

However, I discovered I could import the Premiere session into AfterFX. So what I can do is use Fusion to re-comp all the shots as 16 bit TIFFS in the exact same folders as the TGA files with the same names (except called .tif instead of .tga)

I then edit the Premiere .prproj file in a text editor to replace all instances of .tga with .tif. I can then import this into AfterFX and set the Project settings to render in 16 bit.

Amazingly this seems to work.

Can anyone see any reasons why this shouldn't work? It sounds pretty clever to me.

/ben

wow I really am a genius, no one can find fault in my crazy scheme. Bwa ha haha ha ha ha!!!

Actually, that does seem like a bright idea.

I've only pushed past 8 bit by doubling the highlight data and "adding" it to the footage, but that would deffinitely be better with animation.

Nice.

Did it work?
I would suggest that you reconnect your sources in AE to your higher quaility comps for a less manual and more "official" approach, but maybe your method would work just as well. It's just more "hacky"...

Yes it works - we actually did this on a commercial the other week with 100% success.

It may be "hacky" but I'd rather spend 10 seconds doing this in a text editor than the hour or more it would take to reconnect all the sources for a 120 shot animation in AFX...

/B

I've done a lot of offline/online with Premiere and AE since I have an Andromeda setup. We render out tiff sequences and then also offline material. I've always kept matching folder structures that are mirrored. I then take everything offline in Premiere and then open in AE. I select one file in the list and it finds everything else.

What is it you've been working on? I really want to see. I do a lot of LW work so its awesome to hear someone saying that's they just finished a big project on it! Do you have a link or over on Spinquad or anything?