Exporting from Final Cut to After Effects

Exporting from Final Cut to After Effects

by Albert Succar

on Mar 7, 2011 at 6:20:21 pm

I've been searching online for an answer and have yet to find a reasonable one. What i'm trying to do is edit my video in final cut pro and add effects inside after effects but im worried about losing video quality.

What i was thinking was to add effects to my raw footage FIRST in after effects, then import that footage into final cut, edit and export as a video. What is the best way of doing this (without having to pay for any programs)?

How should i export my video from final cut into after effects and vice versa? All help is greatly appreciated

Re: Exporting from Final Cut to After Effects

by Joey Foreman

on Mar 7, 2011 at 6:57:40 pm

[Albert Succar] "What is the best way of doing this (without having to pay for any programs)?"

Well, hopefully you paid for After Effects and Final Cut;)

Your proposed workflow is fine, assuming that your raw video is in a format that AE can work with. CS5 can work fine with most, but if you have an earlier version of AE, you'll need to transcode your footage to ProRes 422 if it's in a long GOP format like HDV, .mp4, or H.264.

After you've done your work in AE, render to ProRes 422 HQ or ProRes 4444 (straight alpha) if you need to retain an alpha channel for some reason. You must have FCP Studio 3 to work with the 4444 format.

Be sure to enable Final Cut Studio compatibility in the Quicktime 7 preferences to avoid a gamma shift between apps.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Compositor/VFX Artist

Re: Exporting from Final Cut to After Effects

by Greg Hahn

on Mar 7, 2011 at 9:12:53 pm

Automatic Duck is a fantastic program for exporting a sequence from FCP to AE -- but it costs money. You might be able to find a script that does it for free. Just google "After Effects XML import" and I'm sure you'll find a bunch of ways to do it.

Greg

Re: Exporting from Final Cut to After Effects

by Kylee Peña

on Mar 7, 2011 at 9:44:23 pm

There is a script that does this, but I don't have any experience with it so I can't recommend it either way. What I did has an extra step. Basically, you edit your footage how you want it in Final Cut. Once you have it the way you want it, remove all the attributes if you added any positioning to get a rough idea for placement. Save the whole thing as XML. Open Premiere Pro, import the XML, then save the project. Then open After Effects, import the Premiere project, and then save. Ta da.

I actually JUST blogged this workflow yesterday on my blog. :)