Adobe Dynamic Link and Clip Notes Used in Production

A few months ago, I produced a fund raising video for a large hospital. They
show this video to all new employees to get them to contribute to a fund they
have that supports employees and the community.

When I first did the project, I used Photoshop to create some text with effects.
I had imported this multi-layered .psd into AE 6.5 as a comp and AE created the
necessary layers so that I could animate them, which I did. I rendered the
animation with alpha.

I imported this animation, and other similar animations I did in AE for the
video into PP1.5 and did the rest of my edits, cuts, and so on in PP1.5. I
rendered to DVD for the client.

Fast forward 6 months and some of the text that we used to animate is now
outdated. Among other changes, the client wanted to update the text. I opened
the old project in PP2.0 and exported a clip notes Windows Media file and sent
it to the client.

She had some difficulty in exporting a file to send to me (I am not sure yet
what happened) but after a second try, I received the 15k xpdf file with her
comments. I imported it right into my final sequence and her comments show up
right were they are supposed to telling me what to change and where. Quick and
easy.

Some of her changes involved the AE renders from before. So I used
"browse" and located the AE project in the file browser and double
clicked on it. PPro gave me a choice of comps to import into PP2 and I selected
the correct one. I dragged it right over the rendered AE6.5 file and double
clicked on it.

AE 7 opened up and because the comp was saved in 6.5, it opened it up as an
"untitled" project. (This later presented a minor problem in PP to
change the link to the saved project.) This is when I realized that the text
used in the AE comp that needed changing was done in PSCS2. So I selected one of
the layers and hit "edit<edit original" and photoshop opens up with
my file. I changed all of the layers that needed chaning, saved the .psd file
and returned to AE7. Violla! AE is updated, even the psd effects are updated in
their comp that is used as a drop shadow layer in the comp that I was working
on. But since I used idenital keyframes for both the effect layer and the text
layer instead of using parenting, the additional scale properties that I needed
to change due to the text being more charectors than before had to be done to
both layers. Oh well, next time I will remember to parent the effects layer to
the main layer!

Anyway, after a quick preview (sped up with Nucleo) in AE7 I was ready to save
my comp/project. I did this and went back into PP2 and the updates were there
(not rendered of course) as I expected. All I needed to do was render my
sequence and I would be on my way for a new clip notes test for the client. (But
as I now know, encoding does not use preview files so a preview render is a
waste of time.)

Ongoing, as the client has changes, I invision that changes will be even faster
since everything is in the new versions now. With a few minor quirks the two new
important features really worked for me as they should. I had very good
integration between Adobe products, Bridge, Photoshop, After Effects and Premire
Pro. (You might even say that I should add a 5th program, Acrobat, since the
client communication file is a form of a .pdf)

Nucleo is a product from Gridiron software that boosts CPU efficiency for AE
renders and previews. I really do not know how it works but I do know that it
really does work. I'm getting 40% reductions in render times over normal
renders. It works best with dual processors but they claim that it also improves
rendering for HT processors, although I have found no difference with dual
processors running in HT vs just dual processors running normal.

Nucleo is a product from Gridiron software that boosts CPU efficiency for AE
renders and previews. I really do not know how it works but I do know that it
really does work. I'm getting 40% reductions in render times over normal
renders. It works best with dual processors but they claim that it also improves
rendering for HT processors, although I have found no difference with dual
processors running in HT vs just dual processors running normal.