@franklee it was $599 last week at B&H

I presume there's something special about the way AE handles color grading. It preserves details well.

Most of it was Nostalgic. There were a few shots outside that we adjusted for the brightness by switching to Cinema (New Lomo lenses without step rings for my ND filter). All of this was mainly graded with Levels and Curves. Then mixing the opacity of the Minus Red, Minus Green, and Simply Cooler gears. Along with some Spectral Enhancer mixed in.

@shian - Thanks! Huge assest, your tools. Very excited on the fledgling career.

Wedding graded in ColorGHears! Just a trailer, longer bit to come.

Thanks Shian...I love Twilight.

@islanders66 Sure Islanders66 i didn't mean to be rude or anything, it's just that i tried your way before but it seems my computer isn't good enough for so much processing, it's lagging all the time.

@shian Thanks Man.

@AlexManta How to do dissolves in AE.

@AlexManta You can do it that way, or if you are only dissolving occasionally and not every time, you can do the same thing with the dissolves as you would with titles. Put all the dissolve transitions and their respective clips on their own layer, turn everything else off, and export them with alpha channel holes (Animation, PNG, TGA), and then that way you can bring that layer into AE and not have to worry so much about having to break up the master file into individual clips - which is a pain in the ass, I did it for years before Automatic Duck, and editing in AE is mind numbingly slow. In fact this workflow was what I did for everything before AD, but I sacrificed the time to get the quality.

So in short:

Move all dissolving layers onto own track. Turn them off, and Save PP proj.

Import PP proj into AE.

From PP, export just the dissolving clips with their respective dissolves with straight cut clips turned off into a file with an alpha channel.

Bring that exported file into AE and lay it in over the top of your timeline.

Grade accordingly.

OR for more accurate grading results, and zero loss of quality:

Learn to keyframe your opacities on clips in AE. AE should layer the clips the way they were dissolved in PP, and all you need to do is set an opacity keyframe in the top clip right at the point in the timeline where the lower clip begins, and then drop one in at the end of the first clip and set the value to 0. Boom: dissolve. (This is how I would do it. EDIT: see 2 posts down for tutorial)

@shian Ok, first of all it seems like my stupid question, where i thought I was a total dummy is a problem for everyone trying to use PP CS5.5 with AE without dynamic link and/or Bridge...From now on i will work the way you suggested. It's actually how i work as a sfx designer/music composer. It makes every stage more decisive but at least i feel like i'm moving forward doing this and can concentrate on every step fully.

Now about your knowledge and professionalism, i have to say that I'm actually amazed by how much you know about color grading, contrasts, compression etc....You're like a scientist/artist which is fu..ing rare in this world in my opinion. I know down to earth scientist and crazy artists, but both??? Maybe Jesus Christ??? :D

So please keep on giving us these amazing tips and tutorials on ColorGHear.com.

Now I just have one question...let's say i do my whole Editing in PP that i import the sound in it too, mixed in Logic. Can i export it in uncompressed animation fullHD and grade it finally in after effects without losing too much quality to finally do the 444 linear off???

I'd rather do it like this because my cuts are really really detailed and i love to use film and cross dissolve as a part of the flow of my narration..I can't imagine doing this after like @islanders66 is suggesting...and doing this kind of editing in after effects doesn't seem like the right tool for the job.

So I know you use FCP but do you think importing a full HD uncompressed .mov in after effects would be good enough for HD TV channels which is the media we are aiming for? Or do you have another compression setting possible??

@itimjim As a time saver.... would just do CC/Grade in the NLE--- I used to create grades in FCP by duplicating clips on layers and using one as an adjustment layer by stacking the clips on top of each other use the 3 way CC and different blend modes....thats how I did these -- ITS QUICK no huge render wait....then export a H264 QT with proper settings....usually they have something on the info sheet...

I think this a really QUICK way to basically do a similar thing to the AE method. Try it you may be surprised by the results....I dont know what NLE you are using but the concept is the same.

@itimjim I'm not a religious man, but....prayer???

I have stayed away from such contests myself, only because I think they're a waste of time and energy, and a scam to make money perpetrated by the contest runners. I've never seen anything good come of one. I'm sure someone will point to somebody who won one and got a movie deal out of it...but I've never seen it happen.