Premiere Pro: A Realtime Engine for After Effects?

Premiere Pro: A Realtime Engine for After Effects?

on Feb 10th 2011 with 4 comments

Angie Taylor explores the question using Premiere Pro as a real-time engine for After Effects. Her exploration echoes an earlier observation by Jarle Leirpoll, noted in Premiere with CUDA for compositing…

… a lot of the basic compositing you do in AE can now be done in real time in Premiere Pro. …With all the basic stuff in there, like Transforms, Blending modes, CC, Track Mattes, Green Screen (Ultra keyer is amazing) and the most used effects, Premiere Pro is quite capable of doing at least 75 % of the effects stuff I need. In real time. On several HD layers. And as an added bonus, export to web formats, DVD, Blu-ray etc. will be lightning fast compared to AE.

One might also add that there are also quality gains by using a CUDA card. At least one person noted though that rendering hefty AE project sections through Premiere then onto AME takes longer than exporting from AE.

It’s a rarely mentioned topic, so hopefully Angie can continue to clarify the boundaries of what works best for what tasks.

By the way, The Genesis Project has 2 good tips for Premiere Pro CS5 maintenance, and one of them may help with the naughty bits of conformed files. For more info see Dynamic Link for the AE Workflow (an overview by Andrew Devis), optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects by Todd Kopriva, and Working with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects in AE Help.

 
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Rich Young is a long-time After Effects user from the San Francisco Bay Area who tracks AE news at AE Portal.  

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  • http://www.angietaylor.co.uk Angie Taylor

    Hi there,

    Thanks for sharing these articles. I’m afraid I can’t comment on the CUDA card, being a Mac user. However, I’ll be at Broadcast Video Expo next week in the UK where I’ll get the opportunity to test the project I talk about in my blog on an HP Z800 12-core machine so will be able to tell you more after that.

    In terms of comparison times between rendering via AE as opposed to PremPro, I haven’t done any formal tests, TBH I’m not really the type to get involved in benchmark testing and techy nitty-gritty, I’m just an artist who’s predominantly concerned with the actual creative workflow and all I can say is it worked really well for me and definitely saved me time in terms of the actual creative aspect of the project. As for rendering, well I’m used to long render times so I tend to leave my machine doing that overnight anyway.

    I have heard that rendering via AME is preferable in many situations than rendering from AE due to the fact that it offers multipass encoding features that After Effects doesn’t. Usually I render out an uncompressed archive movie from AE, then re-encode it using either compressor or AME for whatever output I need. This time I rendered directly from PremPro via AME as H264. I didn’t do a time comparison but I guess it was probably quicke than doing 2 separate renders.

    Again, I’ll know more on this next week after getting the opportunity to test it out and chat to the engineers. Will keep folks posted on my blog.

    Cheers!

    Angie

  • http://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/ Dennis Radeke

    There’s certainly a lot of possibilities of using AME as a render engine for After Effects. There are pros and cons of course but the big PRO for me is that you can render comps in the background while working in After Effects. You also have the ability to create a watch folder which I think is very useful as well. I did a quick little tutorial a short while ago…

    http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-beginner-classes-with-dennis-radeke/episode-44-gems-inside-of-adobe-media-encoder/

    As for CUDA (Mac and PC), it’s a great enhancement. If you don’t have the $$$ for a card, you’re not crippling CS5 and if you do have a CUDA card, it’s like rocket fuel for Premiere Pro. On the Mac side, I’m very high on the Quadro 4000 card for Mac. While Apple and nvidia have to work out the little bugs that some FCP/Mac users are reporting, I think the long-term prospect of having it is very good.

    Hope this helps. ;-)
    Dennis

  • http://eredesigns.com Mike

    I haven’t yet had the privilege of using C5, but I started a project in Premiere CS4 with high hopes based on the merits listed above. It worked great for a bit…

    Unfortunately CS4 presented some severe stability issues for me (Macbook Pro, OSX 10.5.8). I wasn’t even in HD. Hopefully they addressed some of these issues in CS5.

  • http://www.angietaylor.co.uk Angie Taylor

    Hi there,

    Dennis, thanks very much for the additional info, great to get it from someone with first hand experience.
    Mike, I tried using in CS4 and found, the same as you, that there were some reliability issues. So far I’m not experiencing the same with CS5. There have been a couple of issues when I move source files but nothing that I haven’t been able to fix. That’s not to say it’s bug-free but I certainly found that it worked for me for the entire project.

    cheers,

    Angie