Importing Adobe Premiere projects

The ability to import Adobe Premiere projects eliminates the need to render the project before applying visual effects and animations in After Effects. When you import an Adobe Premiere project, After Effects imports it into the Project window as both a new composition containing each Adobe Premiere clip as a layer, and as a folder containing each clip as an individual footage item. If your Adobe Premiere project contains bins, After Effects converts them to folders within the Adobe Premiere project folder.

After Effects preserves the order of clips in the Timeline, the footage duration (including all trimmed In and Out points), and the marker and transition locations. The arrangement of layers in the Timeline window is based on the arrangement of clips in the Adobe Premiere Timeline. After Effects adds Adobe Premiere clips to the Timeline window as layers in the order they appeared--from the bottom up and from left to right--in the Adobe Premiere Timeline.

Changes made to the speed of a clip, for example, with the Clip > Speed command, are preserved in After Effects and appear as a value in the Stretch column in the After Effects Timeline window. Common effects used by Adobe Premiere and After Effects are also imported, and keyframes for these effects are preserved as well. If you are working in Adobe Premiere, an After Effects icon in the Effects palette denotes common effects used by the two applications. Transitions and titles included in your Adobe Premiere project appear in the After Effects composition as solid layers, maintaining their original location and duration. After Effects discards all transparency and motion settings. (See Importing files into a project.)

Import Adobe Premiere projects in the same way you import footage files: Choose File > Import > File, and locate the Adobe Premiere project file that you want to import.