Adobe suite pipeline in a nutshell

- [Instructor] Great! You have a ton of rendered frames. Now what? Here, we're going to look at how to use the Adobe Creative Suite to finish your post production pipeline. We're going to talk a little bit about dynamic linking, color space, grading and what to do with all of these frames. Now, before we dive any deeper, I want to highlight this course in the online training library. It's an excellent overview on how to use After Effects for visual effects. For our purposes, we're just going to cover some of the basic highlights. Now, in order to use all of these frames and After Effects, we're going to need to zoom up to the top folder, drag v001 into your composition and then once After Effects finishes processing it, we need to go to right click, Interpret Footage, Main. Now, there's a few things we need to do. First, what was the frames per second that you had set up in your render? Was it 24? Was it 23? Was it 30? For my purposes, it was 24. Next, you want to make sure that Color Management is interpreted as linear light. In my case, we've rendered everything out as an EXR, a multi-layer EXR at that that has everything at linear. This is really important because if you're using a law transform, you would want this off. Alright, so once you have these basic settings down, you can hit Enter. Next, let's left click and drag this to right here. That's going to create a new comp; however, you won't be able to see anything. It's all completely blank. Well, that's because we're using a multi layer EXR, and so we need to extract it. So, come over here to Effects, type in "Extractor", left click and drag and let this go right here. It will pop open your effects controls and you want to click on Channel Info, Layers Combined. Now, at first everything's going to be really dark. That's because we had everything set up to be fairly dark in Blender, but that's okay. We can exit out over here and go to Levels, and then just drag Levels right on here. I'm just going to slide this open a little bit, and bring this down. Not all the way because we'll adjust that in a second, but just enough. Now, let's come back up here and let's look at some of the other layers we have. Combined, we also have Ambient Occlusion and in this case, we might want to open up more levels. There you go, looks pretty cool. Another Layer that we have in here is Depth. Now Depth out of Blender is really, really funny and really difficult to use. It stores everything in just a couple of little channels down at the bottom. The next one that we want to use is Normal and Normal just shows where each object is pointing. It's kind of cool, but for our purposes we just need Combined. So, let's go back to Combined, like I said earlier, let's drag this down and we can throw another levels on there and adjust our midpoint here so we can pop some of that out. Now I want to caution against doing color correction in After Effects. Save that for Premiere that way you can do all of your color correction on a full timeline and not per shot, where you risk being inconsistent. So, let's just add an effect really quick. CC Vignette, put that in here and let's just crank it up so we can really see it. Cool. Okay. So now we've created an After Effects comp with our rendered frames and we've extracted the Combined Layer. So, let's go ahead and File, save this. And I'm just going to overwrite my end file right here. Now, let's switch over to Premiere. In Premiere, you can use to setup your storyboards, and time out your whole initial edit. But once you start getting rendered frames, you can use the new File, Adobe Dynamic Link to import After Effects compositions without ever having to render them. So let's go to Desktop, close this out, Exercise Files. I'm going to look for my end file here, and my Composition sequence 1, shot 50, version 1, click Ok. That's going to create a new Composition in Premiere and I can slot that in anywhere I want and take a look at that! We now have our rendered frames in Premiere. Isn't that awesome? Now, there's one more thing we need to talk about and that's Lumetri. You can do all of your color grading inside of Premiere, so I'm just going to pick a very simple look. Let's pull this open over here and I'm going to go for a Clean Punch. Let's left click and drag that right onto our composition. There we go; that appears in our Effects Controls and we've color corrected our fight scene to make it even more intense. But let's say you didn't like the vignette for some reason. Well, that's easy to fix. Let's switch over to After Effects real quick. In After Effects, I can go ahead and simply disable the vignette, save out. And them back in Premiere, you can see my vignette disappears. That's because Adobe Dynamic Link updates that hey don't use that vignette anymore. Make sure that we have everything clean. Now once in a while you will see it pop in here, and that's an occasional bug from Adobe Premiere using rendered cache files. But, that's okay, the moment you let go it will clear it up and render out a new image. And there you have it. A nice, simple, clean edit with instantaneous changes to your effects, all by the click of a button. Adobe has made post production really easy, and incorporating it into your workflow will surely make your pipeline nice and smooth.