After Effects Plug-in
Over the years, I've developed a video editing workflow that involves making a first cut in Sony Vegas and finishing in Adobe After Effects. To help automate the process, I developed an After Effects plug-in that reads in a Vegas EDL file, de-interlaces the footage with the Deinterlace Blend technique, creates easy-to-adjust (color correction mostly) comps from the deinterlaced footage & finally inserts the deinterlaced, color correction footage into the Vegas timeline.
The lastest versions of Vegas & After Effects can use AAF to transfer between applications and this works well, but I find my methodhas advantages.
Here is a description of how to replicate the workflow:
1) Download a copy of the VegasEDL plugin here and place in your After Effects Plugin folder. (April 6, 2008 Update: I modified the plugin to sort clips on Start Time which should solve some placement problems in the final After Effects composition.)
2) Edit your project "cuts-only" in Sony Vegas.
3) Save the project as a Sony EDL file (File->Save As-> Save as Type= EDL Text file.
4) Import this .txt file in After Effects. The plug-in will create the following:
- A top level folder named the same as the EDL txt file.
- Three folders in the top folder, named Color Finesse, Footage, (EDL txt name)-VegasEDL.
- The Footage folder contains all your footage processed with a deinterlacing recipe that creates a nice, fast rendering film-look. The film-look comps are named (footage)-FL.
- The Color Finesse folder contains placeholder comps consisting of the (footage)-FL comps, called (footage)-CF. This is to make it easy to do basic color correction (I use Color Finesse but you can use whatever) on the entire deinterlaced clips though nothing is done by the plugin by default. Any modifications to the CF footage must be done manually.
- The Vegas-EDL folder contains a comp of your Vegas timeline with the footage replaced with the (footage)-CF comps.
5) I add graphics, text, etc then render to uncompressed AVI which I then re-import into Vegas, do the sound mix & final render. I use the Lagarith uncompressed codec.
Known requirements & limitations: PC only, Vegas 8.0b+ only, After Effects CS3 8.02.27+ only. Obviously only useful for interlaced sources. It should handle different fps, resolution & aspect ratios ok. It will cross-dissolve overlapping footage but no other transitions. The only items it imports from Vegas are clip in/out points so don't bother to do anything but a rough edit in Vegas.
Sorry, no support is available but do send aggregious bug reports and I'll fix them if it impacts me & I have time (frankly not likely).
The plug-in is free but if you find it useful, then consider a donation to Verstehen Video.
If you get an error, then it is probably either a non-footage item from Vegas (title, solid, etc) or that the filenames are too long. There is some weird character limit (31?) that I haven't felt like dealing with so keep the total path+filenames short and you should be ok.
If files are not interpreted with the correct field order, then add a rule to "interpretation rules.txt". For example, all the MPEG2 files I work with are upper field but AE thinks they're lower field so I added the following line to "interpretation rules.txt":
# hard rule: all mpeg are Upper field
720, 480, 29.97, "MPEG", * = *, U, *, *, *, *
Happy Editing!