Photo montage in AE, sync'ing with music across pre-comps.

[Ashley7]

I've seen some helpful posts from Rick Gerard​, Mylenium​, Dave LaRonde​ and others regarding this topic. I've started a photo montage in AE that will be inserted into a Premiere project. I need to sync it with audio. I want to use precomps for each photo... but that doesn't work unless I can get audio in the precomps... I see I can create the precomp with a duplicate of the audio ... so that seems fine. In 2017, do we still think it's best to avoid AE for this? For some odd reason, I feel AE is a good thing for me to try using for this, both because of its power, but also because it may be the better tool. This seems to deviate a little from advice to use a video editing app. Let me provide more background on my thinking... I'm curious to hear any thoughts on this if any arise... 

My reasons for choosing AE are... I've been using it more and more for frame-based stuff and am appreciating its power and not afraid of it (have the patience), and I see interesting results which can be achieved for photo/video montages in tutorials and online courses to create very cool looks. I also need to use time remapping which I use in Premiere but I also find Premiere time remapping to be a little more finicky... like the other day I time-remapped a sequence and noticed opacity keyframes had to be moved further down the sequence (the part which has no video due to time remapping speeding things up) than where they actually effect opacity... so I went with the quirk, likely a bug but that's life... if you find a workaround it's a non-issue so I'll take the quirks given the complexity of the quite and related benefits.

I love Premiere but I sense AE has a lot of focus in frame-by-frame and time-remapping areas... AE seems like a reliable workhorse when you want to affect the video of images/video without too much clip-based editing with audio which Premiere can handle without adding new layers, as one example.

So I get how Premiere is more of a luxury for certain kinds of editing but it seems AE is so darn powerful with image manipulation that even for music-sync'ed montages of video/photos it seems worthwhile to consider if one expects a lot of time-remapping coupled with possibly advanced vignetting or more ... and if one has the stomach for AE's depth.

Am I looking at this the right way? I was just surprised to see folks steering people away from AE for more than a few sentences of dialog or a music-sync'ed project in entirety. That was surprising to me so thought I'd check in.

Also thanks for the tips there on dup'ing audio ... that was the answer I was seeking!

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

I set my timing up in Premiere than bring my Premiere edit into AE. You can just copy and paste from your Premiere timeline into After Effects. It's a LOT better to do timing to audio in Premiere than it is in AE.

[Ashley7]

Szalam  wrote

I set my timing up in Premiere than bring my Premiere edit into AE. You can just copy and paste from your Premiere timeline into After Effects. It's a LOT better to do timing to audio in Premiere than it is in AE.

That's a great suggestion... I'm working with AE now and discovering it's doable but I'm learning how to bounce back and forth between an outer and inner (pre) comp to adjust things. For example, if i change the position of a pre comp photo, well I better not do that by moving the pre-comp because it won't keep the pre-comp in sync with its audio... so I set the time indicator to the new position, go into the precomp and drag/snap to there. It's a little cumbersome of course... but when I use time-remapping in AE it's a breeze. I'm sure I'm missing more pitfalls. I may ditch this starter AE and so what you say... not sure. My fear is I'll have some major change earlier in the existing AE timeline that will be a real bear to adjust throughout... I think what I just mentioned is a hint... I'm not going to want to pop into each pre-comp to slide things over. If by then I don't care about the pre-comp temp audio sync it may not be an issue but adjusting tweaking things from that earlier timeline point to my current forward point seems like it could be a big bear... maybe that's what you all have been referring to.

Thanks again.

[Ashley7]

it's funny, I switched to Premiere because of my concerns and the advice of yourself and others (from other threads) and ran into a weird Premiere issue with a blurred vignette... I've been spending a couple of hours already on trying to figure out what's up ... Premiere has been fine... but it's these types of things that generally don't happen in AE...

Premiere opacity changes causes permanent invisibility, playback oddities.

[Szalam]

If you're wanting to do a lot of complex stuff, I would just use Premiere to set the timing up and then just copy and paste everything into After Effects for doing the rest of the work. In that case, I wouldn't be doing anything with blurs/vignettes/etc. in Premiere.

[Ashley7]

Szalam  wrote

If you're wanting to do a lot of complex stuff, I would just use Premiere to set the timing up and then just copy and paste everything into After Effects for doing the rest of the work. In that case, I wouldn't be doing anything with blurs/vignettes/etc. in Premiere.

I'm sort of doing that... What I'm doing is using AE to setup each photo's vignette and animation... then importing those comps into Premiere for use on the timeline there... it works remarkably well. I was thinking there would be perf issues playing back AE via dyn link in this way, but no... it's performing very well... obviously some stutter at times but then Premiere alone does that so I'm not seeing a marked difference given the payoff for using AE's feature.

This is my first montage workflow where I have a lot of vignettes and want good animation control of the photos... so it's been tough to figure out where to start. I started with AE but then swayed to Premiere for simplicity... Premiere was going well but ran into issues which led me to using both AE (first) and Premiere (second to bring it together), what you mentioned.

A side note, I also heard that AE's image scaling is superior to Premiere making it better for initial photo montage work/animation/scaling... not sure if that was/is true but I went with it as some photos are lower res than is optimum for 1080p.

Thanks for your input btw!

[Szalam]

Ashley7  wrote:

A side note, I also heard that AE's image scaling is superior to Premiere making it better for initial photo montage work/animation/scaling... not sure if that was/is true but I went with it as some photos are lower res than is optimum for 1080p.

Are you using the Detail-preserving Upscale effect in After Effects? Using the Detail-preserving Upscale effect in After Effects . That's the best (native) way in AE to upres images.

In Premiere Pro, there is a High Quality option you can tick in the render options that triggers Premiere's improved scaling algorithms.

They both work pretty well considering what they're doing. But neither one works TV's NCIS/CSI-level miracles (because nothing does in real life).

[Ashley7]

Szalam  wrote

Ashley7   wrote:

A side note, I also heard that AE's image scaling is superior to Premiere making it better for initial photo montage work/animation/scaling... not sure if that was/is true but I went with it as some photos are lower res than is optimum for 1080p.

Are you using the Detail-preserving Upscale effect in After Effects? Using the Detail-preserving Upscale effect in After Effects . That's the best (native) way in AE to upres images.

In Premiere Pro, there is a High Quality option you can tick in the render options that triggers Premiere's improved scaling algorithms.

They both work pretty well considering what they're doing. But neither one works TV's NCIS/CSI-level miracles (because nothing does in real life).

"Detail-preserving Upscale" ... I didn't know about that... just watched the video, looks easy to use... will check it out...great info, thank you!

[Szalam]

You're welcome!

[stevelewisza-gEzGvi]

Hey there, for anyone who may be interested, I recently released an After Effects script to make audio flow through your precomps to help with timing in precomps and would help with this

Universal Audio - aescripts + aeplugins - aescripts.com