Adobe After Effects - Trimming

[halex1316]

In Sony Vegas, there was the trimming feature in which you were able to cut out certain parts of a perhaps very long clip, and only add the parts you wanted into the timeline. Is this possible in After Effects?

[Pwolf]

In Sony Vegas, there was the trimming feature in which you were able to cut out certain parts of a perhaps very long clip, and only add the parts you wanted into the timeline. Is this possible in After Effects?

After Effects is a compositing program, it's not really meant to do real editing. This is what Vegas and Premiere are for. Generally you make your cuts in Premiere or Vegas then import them into After Effects for post processing. At best, you can put the video into the timeline and cut it in there.

[halex1316]

I know what it's meant to do, the reason I asked, is I have a friend who does all of their editing in After Effects, and they went away for a while so I couldn't ask them.

[halex1316]

Plus, having to make render after render in order to get the clips into after effects bogs down the workflow.

[Pwolf]

Just saying, there's no easy way to make clips in AE. You're workflow is either going to have to revolve around sub-clipping in VDub or vegas/premiere or do it in the timeline. Personally, it's quicker to sub-clip outside of AE. If you use Premiere, you can use Dynamic Link which makes things much easier.

[halex1316]

Yeah, I dabbled in Premier, but it seemed so foreign compared to Sony Vegas which I'm used to. I heard of an .aaf filetype that you can work between Vegas and After Effects, but it seemed to be a 32bit plugin, and I have the 64bit version of Vegas.

[Brad]

While Pwolf is right, it's not really MEANT for editing, it can certainly do it. I actually just cut our company's reel in AE (but to be fair, it's because I didn't have Premiere installed on my machine at the time. Coincidentally enough, as I just typed that sentence, the Adobe Creative Cloud manager just popped up the "Adobe Premiere Pro CC has been installed" notification).

Basically how you want to do it is, import your footage, have a Composition that is the same dimensions/frame rate as your footage. This is basically your "Sequence" comp, or where you're going to have your music and edited clips. Then, if you double-click on a piece of Footage in your Project bin, it'll open it up in a Footage window. Then, you can set In and Out points (by either hitting the { and } buttons in the window, or hitting Alt + [ or ]), and then click the "Overlay Edit" button beneath the preview. This will put the clip into the Sequence comp. You'll need to shift it around to time up where you need it to be (use the [ and ] keys in the timeline window to snap the clip to your current time). This is definitely going to feel like a weird workflow if you're used to Vegas and Premiere because each clip will be it's own layer, but it is something you can do if you get used to it.

As far as working with EDLs ("Edit Decision Lists" which is what a .aaf is), it can be a bit tricky, as there are so many proprietary EDL formats. But assuming it works exactly as it's meant to, you import the EDL, it imports all the clips you used in your editing program and sets the Ins and Outs of all the clips in a new Comp for you, along with things like speed changes and what-have-you. Unfortunately the reality is, it rarely works perfectly and you end up having to tweak it a shitload.

[halex1316]

The irony. . . hehe (about the notification)

Anyway, really appreciate the feedback. I just don't like having to work with more than one program, and if I can learn one, with the features that I'm looking for, and develop a workflow that is functional within that program, why waste time rendering / importing clips with effects added in an external program? I mean, I used to render the clips that had the effects added, then put them into my vegas timeline, though it worked, it just took too much time.

[Brad]

Well, personally I like the Premiere <--> After Effects pipeline. It is 2 separate programs, but, they work in tandem very well thanks to Adobe Dynamic Link. It basically means that I can import a Premiere Sequence into AE without having to render anything out, and I can import an AE comp into Premiere without having to render anything out. So going back and forth between is a total breeze and I get the best of both worlds. I totally understand your desire to just get it all in one program, and if AE had a better mechanism for simply editing clips together then I'd totally prefer to just stay in AE exclusively (but that's mainly because it's what I'm far more used to).