Dynamic Linking and Project Communication in Adobe Creative Suite

DVInfo.net

You have a project that required just Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Encore to make a DVD. It’s all set up with menus and buttons that match up with the Premiere Pro chapter markers, etc. and it works fine. But the client wants some changes… more sophisticated color grading, and motion graphics for the lower thirds. So, you open up this Premiere Pro project in After Effects and go to work. So far, so good.

Basically have two projects now instead of one. You should be able to use Dynamic Link to import the After Effects changes to Premiere Pro. But how, exactly, do you accomplish this? When you pull up File > Adobe Dynamic Link > Import After Effects Composition and navigate to the *.aep file, the pop-up window gives you the option to import all the bits and pieces, or just individual bits. Do you want to import everything? How do you get the AE changes into your PPro timeline?

“I created a project in Premiere Pro. Then I start After Effects and import the Premiere Pro project. I can see all of the edits from PPro, etc. But when I go back to Premiere Pro, I don’t see the motion graphics that I added in AE. If I make a change in PPro, I see it immediately in AE, just not the other way around. Is Dynamic Link is a one-way street?”

It is one way; Dynamic Link won’t allow circular references, including sequences and compositions that are nested inside other ones. Either an After Effects comp is treated as a clip in Premiere Pro, or a PPro sequence is treated as an asset in AE. If they simultaneously referred to each other, it would create an endless loop.

But, you can use any number of AE comps in a PPro project and multiple instances of a given AE comp throughout a PPro project, as well as vice versa. And you can make distinct copies of a sequence or comp with different names and use them to effectively have a two-way flow, as long as you’re using a duplicate source so there isn’t a circular data path. The new file name doesn’t matter, although if you do a “Save as…” then the link stays with the original file, not the new one. read more...