Well the wizards at Adobe have somehow found a way to overcome the past limitations with Dynamic Link, by now allowing the Link to essentially move both directions in CS4. As seen in Figure 3B and 3C, you can edit an entire sequence in Premiere Pro, select all the pieces, and then choose to "Replace with After Effects" composition. Voila. All the edits you've made are moved to After Effects and there's a single line of "video" in your Premiere Pro timeline which links to the new AE composition. (Now, one limitation that does arise with this is that you're now restricted to doing any additional edtis in After Effects once you do this, specifically to prevent the round-tripping issues I mentioned in the last paragraph. However, this isn't much of a limitation if you wait to go to AE with your edit until you want to add final compositing, special effects, and color grading.)
FIGURE 3B: The new CS4 Dynamic Link allows you to select multiple edit lines in Premiere Pro, Dynamic Link it into After Effects, and the multiple edit lines are now replaced with a single After Effects composition.
FIGURE 3C: In After Effects CS4, all the edit information from the new reverse Dynamic Link is available. You're all set up for final compositing or color grading.
Adobe Dynamic LInk is also available between After Effects CS4 and Encore CS4, which is very useful.
The XFL File Format
If you work in Flash Professional and work in After Effects, you know what a pain it is to have to reproduce a video in an interactive interface for a website. The client likes the AE comp and says something like “I want it just like that, except that in the middle it should stop and give them a question and three buttons to click.” And now your plan to render the video and incorporate it into Flash is toast. You have to assemble all the pieces of the AE comp inside Flash and recreate everything you did in AE.
The XFL file format in CS4 helps address that problem (Figure 4). When you export a composition as XFL, After Effects will render out whatever video needs to be rendered, but then it also carries along the layers of the comp into the XFL file. When you open the XFL project in Flash it has all the layers and assets ready to build the interactive bits.
FIGURE 4. The XFL File Format used between After Effects CS4 and Flash Pro CS4.
XMP Metadata Metadata is information about objects that is carried along with them throughout a workflow. By analogy, I sometimes think of it like a dossier that is carried with a person throughout his or her career. It explains what they did, where they’ve been, and sums up what is known about them. In a simple production workflow we often carry these details around in our heads or on a combination of notebook paper, spreadsheets, and sticky notes. “Oh yeah, this is that clip I shot in June using the HVX camera. I think I shot it at 24p in 1080 mode.”
In a complex workflow, the details can rapidly become overwhelming. Many production houses keep this kind of information in a separate database application. XMP Metadata allows that information to travel with the asset through the workflow, where it is easy to access and update, instead of being maintained separately.
