One last edit: You might ask, “why the hell would I want to do that?” Well, to go back and forth to After Effects via sequence import or Dynamic Link. You get the full power of AE and still able to tweak your edit if need be. It doesn’t have to be locked coming out of Avid (or FCP for that matter).
Last night, I was working on editing the first trailer for the new doc Unheralded. It’s been many weeks, indeed months since I worked out the bugs between my Avid to Premiere workflow. I’d forgotten and had to relearn what I did. So, since what I want to do isn’t really documented anywhere, here’s what you want to do:
FILE > EXPORT
Once your sequence is edited in Avid, go to FILE > EXPORT. You have a few different options. I select simply Link to Video and Audio. You can select a few options deeper down and/or deselect anything you don’t need. This will create your AAF for you.
FILE > IMPORT
In Premiere go to FILE > IMPORT select your Avid exported AAF. Premiere will ask for the link to your files. At this point, you can leave ‘em offline or link ‘em up right there to your online clips. Adobe actually recommends a slightly different route if you want to continue to use your DNxHD stuff (here). Then in Premiere, double click on the newly created sequence and you should have your all your edits neatly ready to go.
That’s Not My Name
If you ingest any footage into Avid, it will rename the new transcoded clips on your disk. There is a character limit as well. My .M2T clips are ridiculously long. Without renaming those, Avid overwrites the last several digits like this:
ORIGINAL: 01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T
AVID: 01_0045_2009_10-28_4B3C0996.mxf
If you’re relinking to different media such as an offline/online scenario, this isn’t as big of an issue as it seems and you don’t have to spend hours renaming things before you go into Avid because:
The clip names in the Premiere bins are the same as they were in Avid which is the same as they were originally: 01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T. So no matter how many times you go back and forth you always know the name of your original (in this case online) file when you’re inside the application (unless of course you renamed those for whatever reason).
Premiere, unlike Avid, allows you to relink to any source file you choose. So while the dialogue screen when relinking says “Where is the file “01_0045_2009_10-28_4B3C0996.mxf?” You can relink that offline clip in the bin to “01_0045_2009_10-28_004308.M2T” and Premiere won’t throw a fit.
*as an aside, make sure those new clips are in a different folder on your disk otherwise Pr. will default to your proxy media, so no orginal (or online) files in subfolders of your proxy media*
Adobe’s vid won’t embed so here’s the link
