Importing Premiere Pro Comp into AE for colour correction

Hi Guys,

I've finished a cut of a film and I am now about to start the grade. I'm using Premiere Pro CS5.5 on a mac. I'd like to use the Color Finesse plugin in AE for the grade and I have been told the best way to grade the whole PP sequence in AE is to import the project into AE (Rather than using dynamic link, or rendering out and importing one file).

This is fine, but I am also planning on making a second, shorter cut. Therefore I am wondering what my workflow should be as originally I planned to grade the longer version, then cut out the shots for the 2nd shorter cut. My concern is that by using 'import premiere pro project' in AE, I'll have to cut the film for the second version in premiere pro and then colour the shots again even though I have already done so for the longer cut.

Is there away to avoid having to do this? Or If I save the PP project within the AE project, will it translate to PP?

Hope that makes sense. Any help appreciated!

I really really dont!

This makes me want to colour correct within PP instead of using Color Finesse!

Unless I can save the correction for each shot as a preset which I can then apply to the new cut afterwards? Still quite long winded but would save a huge amount of time. Do you know if this is possible?

Isn't that backwards? I would think a primary grade would be more of an overall grade scene to scene, and then going in with secondary grades to fix/tweak things would make more sense on a shot-to-shot basis.

Thats a good idea.. I was under the impression that the latter definitions were correct though.

The problem with that though is I wont be able to utilize Color Finesse which is so much better than the standard cc tools in terms of the quality of alterations/how it deals with colour information.

I'm now thinking that I could just replace all the clips in PP with AE comps, copy the original cut into a new sequence, and the make the cuts on the replaced AE comps.

The only downside to this is that obviously these are now AE comps in PP so the rendering will be terrible and the whole edit will truly be locked in the future unless I replace with original and color correct again.

Any thoughts on this?

You're right - I have always been scared of commitment!

I think I'm just going to accept that its time to commit to Picture Lock, what's done is done. And then I can do the quickest/easiest thing to colour two cuts and replace all the shots with AE comps.

I think that's what I'm going to do!..