User Guide

Pro Import AE 5.0 User Guide last updated October 16, 2011 About Pro Import AE Pro Import AE is Automatic Duck's oldest plug-in, first released in the spring of 2001. This plug-in imports into After Effects AAF and OMF files from your Avid, XML files from Final Cut Pro as well as Motion project files. Using Pro Import AE To use Pro Import AE you must first export from Final Cut Pro an XML file, an AAF or OMF 2.0 file from your Avid editing system, or if you're translating a Motion project you can just save the .motn project file. Once you have the file that Pro Import AE can read importing it is as simple as choosing the file in Pro Import AE's import dialog, setting any options then let it rip. How to Import To access Pro Import AE, select it from the File->Import submenu, or right-click/control-click in your project pane and select it from the Import menu. The upper part of the Pro Import AE dialog is the file chooser where you select the file(s) you wish to import. Below the file chooser is a summary of Pro Import AE's settings. Click the Edit Settings button to change these options. page 1 of 22 Settings The settings dialog is organized into two tabs, the Footage and Media tab for options dealing specifically with the imported media files and the Comp and Layers tab that has settings for how the composition is created and layers added. Footage and Media In After Effects parlance the media that gets imported into After Effects to potentially be used in a composition is referred to as footage. In this section of Pro Import AE's settings you tell the plug-in how you would like it to deal with these footage items. Field Separation Sometimes you need to instruct After Effects to separately calculate each field of your interlaced footage, doing so is called Field Separation Explaining when you need to do this, or why you need to do this, is outside the scope of this document. After Effects' help has always been a good resource, indeed the writer of this user guide remembers that even though he had studied broadcasting in college it was the After Effects 3.1 user guide that gave him his first good explanation of interlaced video. Set file type for typeless media There are two ways for a file to identify to the operating system what kind of file it is, either by having a file extension in the name (everyone knows what a file whose name ends in .doc is) or on the Mac by …