Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and DV Workflow

Pixel aspect ratio can sometimes be a bitch hard thing to wrap your head around. And if you’re like me and video is not necessarily your forte, this pixel stretching issue can be quite a bummer. I believe my setup, and subsequent workflow, will be fairly common. Therefore, I’ll be using my workflow as the example.

The players

What is in my workflow? Well, there is a ton! But, we’re going to focus on the following:

• Final Cut Pro 6.0.4
• After Effects CS4 (the AE version shouldn’t matter too much)
• Canon ZR 200 – a simple mini DV camcorder

Our goal is to use these three products together in the most seamless fashion possible. That being said, these are all created and manufactured by different companies and don’t always “talk” to each other like you would want them to. That’s okay, we’ll work around it.

First things first

We need to go out and capture some footage. We are going to be shooting widescreen or 16:9. This widescreen issue can be confusing so I’ll take some time to explain it.

We’re dealing with DV video. DV video has a frame size of 720x480px. This means that the aspect ratio of the footage is 4:3. This is what your looking at when you’re viewing a standard “old-school” tv. Cool. But, we want a widescreen look and we are stuck using a standard DV camcorder.

These standard DV camcorders often have a “widescreen” feature that essentially allows you to capture your footage in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The caveat is that the recorded video is still a frame size of 720x480px. In widescreen mode your camera is essentially cropping off the top and bottom of the images and then stretching the remaining image to fit the 720x480px frame. (A slight bummer because we lose a bit of resolution when doing this)

Without getting into too much more detail, this pseudo widescreen issue can cause all kinds of problems when moving footage around in your editing programs. Most of the frustrations centers around pixel aspect ratio. Pixel aspect ratios are different on a computer than they are on a TV. Our computer monitors utilize square pixels to display the image, while TVs actually use rectangular pixels. Can you say headache? This makes the eventual output for your video an extremely important factor.

All that being said, go capture some footage!

Capturing footage to your computer

Congrats, you’ve got some footage. Now we have to dump it on to the computer. Open Final Cut with your camera connected via firewire and hit command+8. This opens up the capture window. You shouldn’t have to mess around with the settings because Final Cut has gotten pretty damn smart these days.

After you’ve logged and captured your footage. Drag a clip from your the browser window on to the timeline. At this point you’ll probably be prompted by a warning asking whether you want to change the sequence settings to match your clip settings. Yes, you want to do this. This is how Final Cut ensures that the two match. It also sets the precedence for future footage. In other words, if you for some reason happened to drag some HD footage on later, it would warn you.

After Effects and when to use it

After Effects (AE) is a composting program. It is not in any way, shape, or form meant to be your primary editing platform. Cutting up your film and messing around with audio are better left to Final Cut or other dedicated programs. You use AE to better work with layers, 3D spaces, special effects, etc. I mention all this because I think a lot of people tend to give up with Final Cut and assume that every clip has to be edited in AE. Not so fast.

Final Cut has become extremely robust. You can do a ton of things from within the program. In my opinion, the less I have to jump back and forth between software the better. I can, for instance, do major color corrections and stylistic effects without ever leaving Final Cut.

My ultimate point is, use After Effects when it is appropriate and save yourself the headache of the back-and-forth rendering.

Moving from After Effects to Final Cut Pro

So, you’re got some rad Star Wars light saber effect that you’ve created in AE and you need to bring it back into Final Cut. Here are the steps:

1. Make sure your composition settings are NTSC DV Widescreen.

This ensures that we have everything correctly setup for export. This is found under Composition > Composition Settings in case you were wondering.

2. After you’ve got your light sabers, or whatever, looking just the way you want them you need to add your composition to the render queue. Click on Composition > Add To Render Queue. This should swap you over to the render queue itself. At this point you can pretty much use all the default settings. You may need to change your “Output to” location. Click render in the upper right hand corner of the queue.

3. You now have an uncompressed .mov ready to import back into Final Cut. Once you’re back in Final cut you can right click in the browser window and click Import > Files… Select your wonderful new AE footage and import it.

4. At this point you’d think everything would be ready to go. But this is where AE and FCP don’t really talk to each other that well. AE thinks that it correctly exported widescreen DV footage. (And it did). But, since we are ghetto and only shoot on $300 camcorders FCP has slightly different sequence settings. So, you need to right click on your newly imported footage in the browser window and select Item properties > Format…

5. In the final step you need to ensure that anamorphic is checked under the format tab. This goes back to the whole square vs rectangular pixel thing. If you didn’t check anamorphic you’d end up with a horizontally squished image. Your format window should look similar to the following:

You’re ready to drag and drop on to your timeline now without the fear of those stupid pixel issues. Hopefully this has clarified your workflow a bit, or stopped your Googling of the problem. I know it’s something that has always frustrated my.

Alternative Solutions

There are some other workflow solutions out there.

1. Use Adobe Premier Pro instead of Final Cut Pro – CS4 has become quite aswesome with its ability to talk with After Effects. There is a built in seamless transition between the two programs
2. Use Automatic Duck Pro Export FCP – I haven’t personally used this, but it allows FCP to export/import xml info for editing within After Effects. If you had a crazy timeline with many small segments that all needed to be dumped into AE this would probably be your best bet.