I'm no stranger to Adobe Dynamic Links (ADL) and I'm not stranger to just nesting the ADLs in Premiere and then replacing with AE renders. Both of those techniques work well. When you have a monster comp size, ADLs are basically trash. If you're just doing text overlays, ADLs are great. But, what happens when you're working in an 8k or greater project and there's been some editing on the AE level that you have to go back and conform in Premiere before it goes to color in yet another program?
There's a nice little feature in After Effects that let's you export your entire project as a Premiere file. This will bring your edit into PR. Everything doesn't exist in PR so don't even think that it'll be there!
Export an After Effects project as a Premiere Pro project
Beyond that very brief document, I couldn't find a whole lot about preparing these files.
Having used this a few times now, here are some best practices I've learned:
- Duplicate your AE project first because you're going to be getting rid of a lot of things.
- (Optionally, un-precompose each segment to make it a little easier on the input into PR process)
- Remove all expressions from any videos because they will cause a "Nan%" error in Premiere on your footage and videos just won't display. Confusing!
- PR pretty much ignores all text layers, so either remove them all (script anybody?) in After Effects or Premiere. Easier in PR because there might be some other export goblins to get rid of. Some FX come in as solid slugs. Be warned!
- PR will not always link back all of your footage so make sure your AE file is well organized with source folders. It won't ask you to re-link (bug?) so you have to manually select all footage / images etc and link it.
- Some speed ramping, speed reversing doesn't translate back into PR (bug?). The manipulation for this stuff exists in both programs so it's a surprise it doesn't work properly. So: always do a little export so you can crosscheck in PR with a little PIP!
More to come.