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Edit Expertise: Smooth Operator

Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Franklin McMahon

Automatic Duck makes roundtripping easy.

           

The Automatic Duck family of round¬tripping products bridges the gap between programs such as Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, Digidesign Pro Tools, and Autodesk Combustion.

One of the biggest postproduction trends over the past few years is round-tripping, by which you can bring your entire project — along with associated video, audio, and effects — from one program to another. Companies such as Apple and Adobe have made this a major focus. Roundtripping is intended to allow a video professional to sidestep intermediate rendering. If you've already rendered your transitions and effects in one program, you really don't want to move it to the next program only to have to re-render.

Adobe Creative Suite 4, for example, enables tasks such as moving a project from Premiere Pro to Encore, opening After Effects sequences in Soundbooth, and sending After Effects projects directly into Premiere Pro. This may seem easy on the surface, but a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to create this smooth workflow among the packages.

Apple has its own integration hooks: You can move Motion 3 projects to Shake 4, for example, quite easily. Move your Final Cut Pro project into Soundtrack Pro 2 for audio editing, or send your Final Cut Pro project to Motion 3 with cue points, layers, and timing all intact. In fact, Apple even extends a bit toward Adobe: You can import native Motion projects into After Effects as nested compositions, which is a very handy option.

But what if you really wanted to move between wildly different programs from different manufacturers? That's where Automatic Duck comes in. The company has worked for years (next year is its 10th anniversary as a company) at bridging the gap between programs such as After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Digidesign Pro Tools, and Autodesk Combustion. Father-and-son founders Harry and Wes Plate came up with the company name by following Apple's example. They wanted a memorable brand name that did not necessarily mean anything. Automatic Duck now produces four plug-ins: Pro Import AE, Pro Import Cmb, Pro Export FCP, and Pro Import FCP.

Pro Import AE is the oldest and perhaps the company's most popular plug-in. It has many features, but it's designed essentially to do one thing: bring sequences from Avid Media Composer or Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro into After Effects. The latest version, 4.0, offers a host of new features that work toward making the transition to After Effects as seamless as possible. For instance, the Media Composer Timewarp effect translates to the Time Remapping command in After Effects. Transitions in Media Composer such as dip to color work the same once you're in After Effects. Final Cut Pro multiclips now make a smooth move to After Effects, as do elements such as Red Giant's Magic Bullet Colorista processing. Two of my favorite elements of Motion that I spend a lot of time in are the particles and replicators. Pro Import AE translates these as well, but with a small catch: After Effects does not have a built-in replicator or an advanced particle system, so these animations are rendered out of Motion via QuickTime when you export using Pro Import AE. So if you have a backdrop with several sparkly particles flying around, that becomes a video file and imports into After Effects as a standard .mov file. The sequences look the same, but you can't alter the particles or replicators.

Lots of other parameters can be altered once you move your projects into After Effects using the Pro Import AE plug-in. All your media is brought in, so you can trim, slip, ripple, and edit your clips on the After Effects timeline. The file names come in, too. Your keyframes are intact, so you can continue with additional keyframe animation or alter existing keyframes all within After Effects. Additional elements such as 3D effects, cropping, scaling, rotation, nesting, sequence markers, matte keys, titles, subtitles, and motion distorts are translated into the After Effects project using the Automatic Duck plug-ins. Most surprising and useful is that many third-party effects filters are also translated, including those from Boris FX, DigiEffects, Synthetic Aperture, Digital Anarachy, and Red Giant.