Adobe Dynamic LInk
The idea behind Dynamic LInk is that an object can be edited in one program and used in another program at the same time. When the editing program saves its changes, the update is propagated to the using program so that the changes are immediately reflected. The important point here is that it eliminates the need to render out an intermediate file from After Effects.
Let’s compare the rendering workflow with the Dynamic LInk workflow.
Imagine you have a composition in After Effects and you want to include that scene in a Premiere Pro sequence (Figure 2). The old way (before After Effects 7) would be to render out the composition to a file that could be imported into Premiere, usually an AVI or MOV file. It takes time to render the file. Then you have to import that file into Premiere and place it on the timeline. If you want to “tweak” something in the original composition, you have to return to the original project in After Effects, make the change, render the new file, import the new file into Premiere, and replace the old file on the timeline.
With Dynamic LInk (which was introduced with Adobe AE 7/PPro 2 release), instead of rendering out a file, you simply save the project. Then in Premiere Pro you open the After Effects project file using “Import After Effects Composition…” and select the composition you want to import. Premiere Pro understands After Effects project files. This composition is now dynamically linked. If you make a change in the original composition in After Effects, it shows up on your timeline in Premiere Pro. No rendering. No file replacing. It’s much easier. It’s much faster. And you don’t have to worry about possibly rendering out in the wrong mode and creating quality issues.
FIGURE 2: Adobe Dynamic LInk of After Effects CS4 compositions into Premier Pro sequences.
FIGURE 3: Dynamic LInk a blank After Effects composition from within Premiere Pro.
When I first played around with a previous version of Premiere Pro, which offered the “New After Effects Composition…” function (The CS4 version of which is shown in Figure 3), I remember being confused.
When I had clicked this, I expected that the sequence I was working on or the MOV file I had selected in Premiere Pro would magically show up in After Effects as a new composition. But this is not how it worked. Instead, it opened up a new completely empty black-background composition in AE. However, the new comp was already linked between Premiere Pro and After Effects. And any change that I made to the empty comp in AE showed up in Premiere Pro.
The completely empty comp was confusing at first. And then I realized it was a design choice that Adobe had made to deal with a technical problem called “round-tripping”. If it were possible to dynamically link a Premiere Pro sequence in After Effects, and also to dynamically link an After Effects composition in Premiere Pro, then you could end up with some very weird cross-application recursive nesting of comps and sequences. Round-tripping issues commonly show up as scaling problems in dynamically linked software. Months after a product is released, when the biggest power users are on a critical deadline, the system grinds to a halt. And there is usually no recourse, because the system will have reached its limit for recursion.
