After Effects and Photoshop

You can use various other Adobe applications to enhance or modify the assets used in a Premiere Pro project. Also, you can use Premiere Pro to edit projects begun in other applications.

In Premiere Pro, the Edit Original command opens clips in the applications associated with their file types. You can edit clips in the associated applications. Premiere Pro automatically incorporates the changes into the current project without replacing files. Similarly, Premiere Pro sequences placed in other applications, such as Adobe After Effects can be opened with the host product’s Edit Original command.

Copy between After Effects and Premiere Pro

• From the After Effects Timeline panel, you can copy layers based on audio or video footage items (including solids) and paste them into the Adobe Premiere Pro Timeline panel.

• From the Adobe Premiere Pro Timeline panel, you can copy assets (any items in a track) and paste them into the After Effects Timeline panel.

• From either After Effects or Adobe Premiere Pro, you can copy and paste footage items to the other’s Project panel.

  note: You can’t, however, paste footage items from the After Effects Project panel into the Adobe Premiere Pro Timeline panel.

If you want to work with all clips or a single sequence from an Adobe Premiere Pro project, use the Import command instead to import the project into After Effects.

Copy from After Effects to Adobe Premiere Pro

You can copy a layer based on a footage item from an After Effects composition and paste it into an Adobe Premiere Pro sequence. Adobe Premiere Pro converts these layers to clips in the sequence and copies the source footage item to its Project panel. If the layer contains an effect that is also used by Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro converts the effect and all of its settings and keyframes.

You can also copy nested compositions, Photoshop layers, solid-color layers, and audio layers. Adobe Premiere Pro converts nested compositions to nested sequences, and solid-color layers to color mattes. You cannot copy shape, text, camera, light, or adjustment layers to Adobe Premiere Pro.

Results of pasting into Premiere Pro

When you paste a layer into an Adobe Premiere Pro sequence, keyframes, effects, and other properties in the copied layer are converted as follows:

Copy from Adobe Premiere Pro to After Effects

You can copy a video or audio asset from an Adobe Premiere Pro sequence and paste it into an After Effects composition. After Effects converts assets to layers and copies the source footage items into its Project panel. If the asset contains an effect that is also used by After Effects, After Effects converts the effect and all of its settings and keyframes.

You can copy color mattes, stills, nested sequences, and offline files, too. After Effects converts color mattes into solid-color layers and converts nested sequences into nested compositions. When you copy a Photoshop still image into After Effects, After Effects retains the Photoshop layer information. You cannot paste Adobe Premiere Pro titles into After Effects, but you can paste text with attributes from the Adobe Premiere Titler into After Effects.

Results of pasting into After Effects

When you paste an asset into an After Effects composition, keyframes, effects, and other properties in a copied asset are converted as follows:

Work with Photoshop and Premiere Pro

If you use Photoshop to create still images, you can use Premiere Pro to make them move and change. You can animate an entire image or any of its layers.

You can edit individual frames of video and image sequence files in Photoshop. In addition to using any Photoshop tool to edit and paint on video, you can also apply filters, masks, transformations, layers styles, and blending modes. You can paint using the Clone Stamp, Pattern Stamp, Healing Brush, or Spot Healing Brush. You can also edit video frames using the Patch tool.

In Photoshop, with the Clone Stamp, you can sample a frame from a video layer and paint with the sampled source onto another video frame. As you move to different target frames, the source frame changes relative to the frame from which you initially sampled.

After making edits, you can save the video as a PSD file, or you can render it as a QuickTime movie or image sequence. You can import any of these back into Premiere Pro for further editing.

If you use Premiere Pro to create movies, you can use Photoshop to refine the individual frames of those movies. In Photoshop, you can do any of the following:

• Remove unwanted visual elements.

• Draw on individual frames.

• Use the superior selection and masking tools to divide a frame into elements for animation or compositing.

Comparative advantages for specific tasks

The strengths of Premiere Pro lie in its numerous video editing features. You can use it to combine Photoshop files with video clips, audio clips, and other assets. You can use the Photoshop files, for example, as titles, graphics, and masks.

In contrast, Photoshop has excellent tools for painting, drawing, and selecting portions of an image. The Photoshop Quick Selection tool and Magnetic Lasso tool make it easy to create a mask from a complex shape. Rather than hand-drawing a mask in Premiere Pro, consider doing this work in Photoshop. Similarly, if you are applying several paint strokes by hand to get rid of dust, consider using the Photoshop paint tools.

The animation and video features in Photoshop Extended include simple keyframe-based animation. Premiere Pro, however, provides quite a bit more keyframe control over various properties.

Premiere Pro can import and export still images in many formats. For greatest versatility, however, use the native Photoshop PSD format when transferring individual frames or still image sequences from Photoshop to Premiere Pro.

When you import a PSD file into Premiere Pro, you can choose whether to import it as a flattened image, or with its layers separate and intact.

It is often a good idea to prepare a still image in Photoshop before importing it into Premiere Pro. Examples of such preparation include correcting color, scaling, and cropping. It is often better to change a source image in Photoshop than to have Premiere Pro perform the same operation many times per second as it renders each frame for previews or final output.

In Photoshop, you can create a PSD document that is set up correctly for a specific video output type. From the New File dialog box, select a Film & Video preset. In Premiere Pro, you can create a PSD document that matches your composition and sequence settings. Choose File > New > Photoshop File.

Create and edit Photoshop files

You can create a still Photoshop file that automatically inherits the pixel and frame aspect ratio settings of your Premiere Pro project. You can also edit any still image file in a Premiere Pro project in Photoshop.

Create a Photoshop file in a project

Edit a still image file in Photoshop

From within a project, you can open an image file in most formats that Adobe Photoshop supports. Premiere Pro does not import files in CMYK or LAB color formats.