Last week Matthew Jeppsen posted an article to this Adobe TV video entitled “Import FCP Projects into Adobe Premiere CS4” – today’s tip is that the title could just as easily have said “Import FCP Projects into Adobe After Effects CS4” – keep watching, and the whole workflow is there.
By converting the Premiere Pro timeline to an After Effects composition, you get a layer stack with handles – just what you would want to get to work adding effects, redoing FCP animations with the subtlety and elegance possible in After Effects, or even color looking an entire piece in an application whose ability to track in secondaries goes way beyond what’s available in most color suites.
It’s worth noting, however, that this is a one-way ticket: a set of edits in Premiere Pro is sent to After Effects as a Composition, so all the individual clips and cuts are thereafter something of a monolith in the PPro editing timeline.
So where does this leave Pro Import AE from Automatic Duck? It will still get you from FCP to AE in a single step, and you may want to check its feature list for items that you care about that XML doesn’t support and share those in the comments.