@stonebat some of it is in the current dynamic range tutorial, the rest will be covered in the Film School series, but in general, the sweet spot is between 0 and 1 stop over. 1 1/3 is pushing it.

@all @shian ok guys I m getting crazy here, i have been trying to open a premiere pro CS 5.5 sequence of a short that i m working on, in after effects to be able to use ColorGHear...I wanted to open the original sequence from premiere, this way i wouldn t convert and degrade anything and would use the mts files directly...I opened the project everything seemed fine at first...I graded it...rendered to queue; rendered it but now EVERY TRANSITION/DISSOLVE DONE IN PREMIERE PRO, every text, even the sound mix disappeared after render...It s like it just kept the basic cuts...WTF is happening...i lost a whole day of work on that...Can someone please help me???

@AlexManta dude, screen shots. I don't know what your timeline looks like. I'm guessing you likely broke some of the connections by pre-comping, BUT without seeing it, it's hard to tell.

@Shian Actually just opening the premiere pro project in after effects gives me errors, it doesn't import titles and it doesn t play the audio mixed either, i m truly sorry to be a beginner at this, but your tutorials make me want to use your workflow...But maybe it seems that after effects doesn t import dissolve or titles or audio mixes from premiere pro..that s what I think i saw on adobe s website...

@AlexManta as I'm not a PP user its hard for me to suggest a work around. I always export the sound mix to a wav file and bring it in to AE separately. I would export the titles as a 32bit TGA or PNG sequence with an alpha channel, and lay it in over the top in AE.

Then delete (or turn off) the titles and the audio, and save a copy of the project without titles and sound, and see if that imports properly.

@shian yes it should work...but what the cross dissolve??? Do you have any ideas??

@shian Thanks I'll try my best to find my way through all that...Thank you for your knowledge and advices Shian.

@AlexManta @sanzadez @shian I wonder if you could do all of your grading in AE. Then from AE choose save as PP project...open in PP and just re-do all the transitions... haven't tried that but I think it may work. You would then just be rendering out your final file Via PP and Media Encoder ... Shian? Thoughts on this?

What I have been doing when I do need to use transitions as such, I link the clips in PP to AE. You can right click the clip in PP and select "replace with AE file" or something like that. Then color grade in AE and it would link to the PP timeline. For the most part I don't have to do this because I don't use dissolves often, as far as titles go, I just create them in AE and use them there. When using the above method I used to just export out of PP but after a post in the Driftwood thread, it showed some degradation when exporting from PP, so I don't plan on exporting out of PP anymore. If you have any advice @shain we would love to hear it. But as you said, you don't use premiere so I wont hound you for a fix. Another way to fix the dissolves may be to do them manually with key-frames and opacity rather than just applying a cross dissolve effect. Not sure if that would work as I haven't tried it, but just came to mind right now.

@No_SuRReNDer Yeah, it does take a tole as both need to be open, but its not too bad for me. And I do try to do it as little as possible. As for point #3, I only done it after I have already edited everything as I want, so that I don't have to work with it too much in Premiere after I grade the clips. First I cut everything together, and then link and color. As for the degradation, I haven't really seen any noticeable difference. There was a post though by @bwhitz on page 8 I believe of the Driftwood thread that showed "degradation" under some circumstances. So it just got me thinking maybe from now on I should finish in AE all the time. About the bickering, don't worry, I am one of the people that enjoys a clean thread and feels all that bickering should be taken else where.

EDIT: The post bwhitz made was about 5DtoRGB vs Premiere, so exporting out of AE rather than PP may or may not make a difference, have yet to test.

haha nice whitepaper @shian you could change speedgrade to colorghears and have a exact description. thanks again really honestly you have a very kind human nature!

And to address my outburst in the Quantum X thread:

The internet forum is a great place for new and different ideas to be shared. I LOVE that about forums.

BUT what irritates me is that invariably someone without any qualifications, or any solid scientific data (by that I mean: tested, retested, verifiable and reproducible data to present) will choose to lay out a theory as fact. If someone says I have a theory about this. Hey that's great, but when someone throws out a mere theory, and declares it a fact, with little or nothing to back it up, and then tells someone who is qualified to make declarative statements, with sufficient data to back it up, and years of experience working at the highest levels of the field that they don't know what they're saying, and begins trying to torpedo other people's work (namely rarevision) I get really fucking pissed.

Why, you may ask, would I care? Because it causes confusion. People come here for information and solutions, and in many cases they spend money on equipment and software based on the experiences of those participating in the forums, some who have proven to be trusted sources, and others who just want everyone to think they're the shit. You won't see me commenting a lot about the ins and outs of the patches, I barely understand how they work, but when it comes to Cinematography and Grading I really do know what I'm talking about. You don't survive in this town unless you can hang.

It's really kinda petty on my part that I have had to repeatedly qualify myself around here. I don't like tooting my own horn. I like teaching. But I can't sit by idly while the un-intelligencia undermine what has been, and can be, an extremely valuable resource by polluting it with dumbass opinions.

And then people get upset. They stand up and say, "I have every right to state my opinion, and you have to respect my opinion!" No, the fuck, I dont! I have to VALUE your FACTS, undeniable facts HAVE to be valued. Your opinion, especially if it's retarded, can fuck the hell off.

That's my professional opinion on the subject -- :)