When I first saw the demonstration of Nuke Studio shown on NAB, with each new feature I was thinking: yes, this is exactly as it should be done. This is precisely how Dynamic Link should work from the get go in Adobe applications. Congratulations to The Foundry for making it happen. I wish I could afford your tool 🙂
It so happened that I was also heavily involved in a project having a lot of visual effects. In essence, every shot in the movie required either a fully fledged matte painting or comping. I have not yet counted the shot number, but suffice to say, I would kill myself before even attempting to use Dynamic Link in its current form in this project. And I’m sure Premiere Pro would die long before all compositions were placed in the timeline, not even mentioning attempting to relink them on another machine.
Don’t get me wrong – I like Dynamic Link for what it is. But it is missing quite a few features which are crucial for this type of project. It does not automatically create handles, and it does not allow you to easily substitute compositions for rendered files, it does not manage versions. For a larger project it’s a show-stopper. You need to find another way.
A solution to this problem was to move the whole edit to After Effects, and attempt to leverage its scripting capabilities to automate distributing separate shots to artists, and later manage the incoming versions. I investigated already available solutions (Save Comp As Project 2, Bao Dynamic Comp, Pre-Compose Geek 2, and Project Sync), but each fell short for our purposes. The decision was made to write our own tool. And so the Conform Studio was born.
The scripts give you the flexibility to manage your Visual Effects pipeline in After Effects in a similar manner that Nuke Studio does it. You can automatically precompose your shots and batch rename them in one go, extract them into separate project files and trim the media to reduce the amount of data that you will distribute over the Internet, or in any other way altogether. Finally, you can replace your compositions with rendered files, update the renders to the latest versions, or even replace them with files from a separate folder. We have it all. See for yourself:
The full line of tutorials is available on my YouTube channel.
Of course, it’s one thing to develop a local pipeline script, and another to make sure that all the use cases are taken care of, or at least the script does not crash if something unexpected happens. This is why the premiere is today, and not a month ago. The script was developed for That Studio, it is released under its brand, though if you decide to purchase it, you are supporting Creative Impatience as well.
Unlike other products, Conform Studio is available from aescripts+aeplugins website. For about two weeks it sports the introductory price of $59, later it will be $79.
Blown away, my friend. Awesome script!!!
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