While editing an Adobe Premiere CS6 project based on XDCAM-EX footage (from an EX3), I thought I’d enhance the footage in After Effects (where more sophisticated enhancement effects than in Premiere are available). Should be easy I thought, taking advantage of the CS6 suite’s Dynamic Link feature.
In Premiere, I selected the relevant clip and did [RightClick > Replace With After Effects Composition]. As expected, this opened After Effects, with the appropriate dynamic link to Premiere…
…BUT…
All I got on the Preview in After Effects, and indeed back in Premiere, was Color Bars. I assumed this indicated some kind of failure in After Effects.
Naively, I concluded that, on my system at least, After Effects CS6 could not read XDCAM-EX. A brief web-search (further below) revealed user experiences and video convertor article-adverts implying that I was not alone with this problem. But an Adobe blog entry suggested that no such problem existed in AE CS6 and some and Adobe documentation (pdf) said so explicitly. For the moment then, I was confused…
Then I rebooted and tried again. This time it worked. I succeeded in making AE projects both by directly importing the footage (as mp4 files) in AE and via Dynamic Link from Premier.
The direct import dialog was slightly weird though: it claimed it was listing “All Acceptable Files” but these included not only [.mp4] files but also e.g. [.smi] files, which, when I selected one of these it complained: “…unsupported filetype or extension”. Incidentally, the reason I tried it at all was that XDCAM-EX is a spanned format, where a single recording can be spanned/split/spread over multiple [.mp4] files. Furthermore, there can be an overlap of content from one [.mp4] to the next (in a span), so in principle (I haven’t tried it), simply placing one [.mp4] after another on the timeline would give rise to a (short) repetition at each transition (from one [.mp4] to the next).
But this is already over-long for a single blog-post, so I’ll deal with that issue in a separate post.
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