Edit Expertise: Smooth Operator

The Automatic Duck family of round¬tripping products bridges the gap between programs such as Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, Digidesign Pro Tools, and Autodesk Combustion.

One of the biggest postproduction trends over the past few years is round-tripping, by which you can bring your entire project — along with associated video, audio, and effects — from one program to another. Companies such as Apple and Adobe have made this a major focus. Roundtripping is intended to allow a video professional to sidestep intermediate rendering. If you've already rendered your transitions and effects in one program, you really don't want to move it to the next program only to have to re-render.

Adobe Creative Suite 4, for example, enables tasks such as moving a project from Premiere Pro to Encore, opening After Effects sequences in Soundbooth, and sending After Effects projects directly into Premiere Pro. This may seem easy on the surface, but a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to create this smooth workflow among the packages.

Apple has its own integration hooks: You can move Motion 3 projects to Shake 4, for example, quite easily. Move your Final Cut Pro project into Soundtrack Pro 2 for audio editing, or send your Final Cut Pro project to Motion 3 with cue points, layers, and timing all intact. In fact, Apple even extends a bit toward Adobe: You can import native Motion projects into After Effects as nested compositions, which is a very handy option.

But what if you really wanted to move between wildly different programs from different manufacturers? That's where Automatic Duck comes in. The company has worked for years (next year is its 10th anniversary as a company) at bridging the gap between programs such as After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Digidesign Pro Tools, and Autodesk Combustion. Father-and-son founders Harry and Wes Plate came up with the company name by following Apple's example. They wanted a memorable brand name that did not necessarily mean anything. Automatic Duck now produces four plug-ins: Pro Import AE, Pro Import Cmb, Pro Export FCP, and Pro Import FCP.

Pro Import AE is the oldest and perhaps the company's most popular plug-in. It has many features, but it's designed essentially to do one thing: bring sequences from Avid Media Composer or Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro into After Effects. The latest version, 4.0, offers a host of new features that work toward making the transition to After Effects as seamless as possible. For instance, the Media Composer Timewarp effect translates to the Time Remapping command in After Effects. Transitions in Media Composer such as dip to color work the same once you're in After Effects. Final Cut Pro multiclips now make a smooth move to After Effects, as do elements such as Red Giant's Magic Bullet Colorista processing. Two of my favorite elements of Motion that I spend a lot of time in are the particles and replicators. Pro Import AE translates these as well, but with a small catch: After Effects does not have a built-in replicator or an advanced particle system, so these animations are rendered out of Motion via QuickTime when you export using Pro Import AE. So if you have a backdrop with several sparkly particles flying around, that becomes a video file and imports into After Effects as a standard .mov file. The sequences look the same, but you can't alter the particles or replicators.

Lots of other parameters can be altered once you move your projects into After Effects using the Pro Import AE plug-in. All your media is brought in, so you can trim, slip, ripple, and edit your clips on the After Effects timeline. The file names come in, too. Your keyframes are intact, so you can continue with additional keyframe animation or alter existing keyframes all within After Effects. Additional elements such as 3D effects, cropping, scaling, rotation, nesting, sequence markers, matte keys, titles, subtitles, and motion distorts are translated into the After Effects project using the Automatic Duck plug-ins. Most surprising and useful is that many third-party effects filters are also translated, including those from Boris FX, DigiEffects, Synthetic Aperture, Digital Anarachy, and Red Giant.

Automatic Duck''s plug-ins support drag-and-drop. Here, I am dragging an Apple Motion project into Adobe After Effects. The small icon shown is dragged from Motion and is dropped right into After Effects'' project window.

Automatic Duck's other programs work in the same way as Pro Import AE. Pro Export FCP 4.0 enables moving projects out of Final Cut Pro and into Media Composer, Pro Tools, and Quantel Generation Q systems. Pro Import Cmb imports project files from Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, or Premiere Pro into Autodesk Combustion.

Pro Import FCP 2.0 moves OMF 2.0 project files out of Media Composer and Pro Tools and into Final Cut Pro. This plug-in includes an added bonus: support for Toon Boom Animation Storyboard Pro for doing previsualization work. Storyboard Pro is a program that facilitates the development of storyboards, complete with dissolves, cuts, and pans. You can mock up your entire movie or TV show using the tools in the program, export them out, and bring them into Final Cut Pro. To make things compatible, Automatic Duck exports Storyboard Pro sequences as rendered QuickTime movies, one for each scene, so they can quickly be imported into Final Cut Pro. The footage, along with all the dissolves, pans, and cuts, comes up as its own sequence timeline in Final Cut Pro. Once in Final Cut Pro, you can use the storyboard to match up your actual shots in a new timeline. This comes in handy for replicating the angles and pacing from your storyboard to your actual production. This collaboration between the programs (via the Pro Import FCP 2.0 plug-in, of course) can help more media artists use previz software for mapping out their productions. There has traditionally been a disconnect between storyboarding programs and editing programs, but Automatic Duck works toward unity.

The plug-ins work remarkably well. Considering the translations going on behind the scenes, they're also speedy at importing and exporting project files. On an eight-core Mac Pro, I never had to wait more than a minute to import or export projects between the programs.

Automatic Duck's plug-in registration and upgrade process is slightly complex, with serial numbers, registration, activation, and upgrade codes — but the company does have to protect its assets. Upgrading from an existing package to a new version involves signing up on different sections of the Automatic Duck website and obtaining a code to then use via the online store. It's certainly not as easy as just purchasing an upgrade and installing it, and the company could work toward making the process a little more user-friendly. Instead, you're up against a dense page of step-by-step instructions. I also could not find any uninstall instructions. You use an installer for all the plug-ins (as opposed to dropping a file into a plug-in folder), and the installer seemingly installs a large group of support files. I did not experience any conflicts, but it would certainly be nice to have a one-click uninstall if, for some reason, a user wanted to get rid of the plug-in to do some troubleshooting.

Considering the big manufacturers' efforts toward interplay among their own various programs, is there still a need for Automatic Duck's array of plug-ins? Most definitely. The software goes well beyond just XML cut lists. Most programs these days support basic EDL, but that typically does not transfer effects — just shot lists. The Duck plug-ins actually recreate your project experience in a completely different program from an entirely different vendor.

The plug-ins are most helpful when you veer outside the realm of the Adobe or Apple suite. If you stick to either of those, most of the time you can move projects between two different software programs within the suite without re-rendering. Using Automatic Duck products, you have much more flexibility to mix and match different software programs from different vendors.

If you use the Duck tools, the extent to which your work is transferred and editable depends largely on your style of content production. If you typically do a lot of straight cuts and dissolves in your timeline with a few titles, you will have no problem moving among all the programs and altering elements in any of them. On the other hand, if your workflow is more compositing-heavy with lots of digital effects, bear in mind that some specific tools in program A (such as particles) will be rendered as video and uneditable in program B.

Also bear in mind cost. The $500 price tag for each plug-in does call into question the options you need for transferring projects. (Automatic Duck offers a suite of three plug-ins for $1,095 for a savings of $400.) Now that I have spent time with the latest versions of the software, it's definitely got me thinking in some new directions. I typically use either Motion or After Effects for a specific project or client, but now I'm starting to think of these two software packages as interchangeable. Via the roundtripping that's enabled by Automatic Duck's plug-ins, I'm starting to use the best of both software worlds for my latest projects.

Automatic Duck is very focused on transforming a diverse group of programs from different vendors into one mega-suite that seemingly has no boundaries. If you have some of these programs that I've discussed, the Automatic Duck family of plug-ins should get you thinking in some new creative directions.

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