Countless times over the past several years, either myself or a co-worker has wondered “Why the hell do I have to re-import this entire After Effects project every time there’s a change?” Apparently, Chris Roe was thinking the same thing.
If you ask me, a good post-production product needs three things: ease of use, speed and great customer service. Project Sync has all three. The idea behind this Adobe After Effects plug-in is simple: import an existing project into your current working project, click Sync and your projects are now in sync. It’s as simple as that.
Let’s explore it a bit more. From your working project, import the master project from which you would like to use elements, comps, layers or the entire project.
Once the project is imported, click on its folder and sync it back to itself in Finder or Explorer. I emailed Chris about automating this feature and he said he’d look into it.
Once the project is synced, you see a Sync folder in your Project panel. I’m assuming this is meant to be ignored, as I haven’t needed to do anything with it yet.
At this point, any changes made to the external project will ripple through to the current project.
After a certain amount of time, designated by the user in the Option settings, After Effects will look for any changes and notify you with an iOS style notification window.
If you click on Manage, another window pops up that allows you to manage the synced projects.
So there it is, a simple app that does what most people I know, think should be a permanent feature of After Effects.
One last thing that I’d like to mention is Chris Roe himself. At the time of my install, Chris had yet to create a CS5.5 installer which is what we are currently running at the office. Chris promptly returned many emails from me regarding the manual installation process and even jumped on a chat service to walk me through it. He was extremely patient and helpful the entire time. Chris also stressed that he welcomes any ideas as I continue to put Project Sync through the paces.
I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Project Sync as soon as it becomes available. You’ll wonder how you got along without it.
Learn more about Project Sync.
18 Responses to this post
March 27, 2012 at 9:44 am |
Sounds great. Does this require that the project file always have the same name? I like to do incremental saves, with numbers added at the end (like Honda_1_0, Honda_1_1…etc.
March 27, 2012 at 10:13 am |
Hi Aharon,
We’ve built Project Sync to know when you save an increment. You will receive a notification that an increment was created, and asks if you’d like to sync with it.
Feel free to ask any other question, we’re excited about how the plug-in is going to change the way people work!
-Chris
March 27, 2012 at 9:50 am |
Great find!
That would be probably one of the must haves for ae-Teams , and BG renderer of course
John, allow me a few Questions:
- did it run stable on your tests
- Did you work on mac/win ?
- What kind of Network/Server do you use in your facility?
Cheers,
Illd
March 27, 2012 at 10:35 am |
@illd – I can’t answer for John, but I can say that in all of the testing we’ve done, there have been no crashes and we haven’t missed any file updates.
The plug-in will be available for Mac and Windows of CS5/5.5 and it will be available for CS6 when it is released.
The beauty of the plug-in is in it’s simplicity. You can watch any file for changes, even in a dropbox folder ( So technically can Sync your projects with designers across the planet ).
Feel free to ask any other questions, I’m happy to answer them!
-Chris Roe
March 27, 2012 at 11:03 am |
Hi Chris,
One more question: Lets say two workers use different disks as workspace. How would the plugin react to missing footage? Would you have to relink on the “Master” every time you update the “slave project” or could it remember the path you relinked the data once? In theory it shouldn ´t work
Best wishes from Germany for this great Project!
illd
March 27, 2012 at 11:24 am |
You are correct, in this instance you would have to relink every time. However, if you’re in a local network you could just reference the footage on the master machine and avoid this issue.
Hope this answers your question,
- Chris
September 13, 2012 at 2:35 pm |
hey Chris,
when do you think a version for CS6 will be released?
cheers
d
March 27, 2012 at 11:16 am |
Illd,
I ran the tests on both windows and Mac running on Xserves, rock solid on both.
Best,
Craig
March 28, 2012 at 9:48 am |
@craig: Thx for the response. This is geting better and better to me
March 27, 2012 at 6:07 pm |
I think I’m getting my hopes up here, but will this help with the reconform issues of AE + premiere workflow?
Let’s say I’m doing finishing in after effects. I import the edit by importing the entire premiere pro project, and start coloring. Then later on the edit changes. Can I resync to the latest edit?
March 28, 2012 at 8:42 am |
Alex -
I’m not too familiar with Premier Pro, but do you do a dynamic link with Premier in AE? If not, can you explain your workflow and I’ll give you a better answer.
Thanks,
-Chris
March 28, 2012 at 9:45 am |
Alex, if I can give you one tip: Right now don ´t rely on Adobe dynamiclink (dyn.link) for bigger projects!!! It is working for several hours and days and than out of nothing it doesn ´t work no longer. If those “dyn.links” files are messed up and broken – there is no way to rebuild your project. You can ´t even backup this “dyn.link vodoo” which is because it occurs in the background – it is not clear which files are reliable for a working backup.
Another stupid thing is that you can do a dyn.link of an AE project into Premiere. But if you wan ´t to finish the whole projekt afterwards in AE the dyn.link form Premiere to AE doesn ´t work because it was already dyn.linked…
Believe me – It took me a few nights to find that out…I hope they will fix all this mess with CS6 because in theory its a great thing to work with
March 28, 2012 at 8:39 pm |
John & Chris, thanks for the info. This sounds like it will save us a tonne of time. Looking forward to it!
March 29, 2012 at 2:03 am |
thy is is amazing!
March 29, 2012 at 6:37 am |
Wow, im very excited about this new plug-in. cant wait
Question to all of you: Do you work alot with After Effects over Network? Didnt you experience some lag in rendertime and workperformance when working with big files?
And how about that new Plug-In… does it work fine with big files in referenced After Effect Projects somewhere in the Network?
Best,
Peter
April 4, 2012 at 7:54 am |
I had this on my bookmarks for along time now… and kind off forgot about it, good to see it’s finally out, cant wait to try this at work! Thanks for the heads up!
June 29, 2012 at 11:41 pm |
not working on CS4,, i have old projects and plug-ins that work better in CS4 so i must use from time to time CS4. so sad that i cant use it on CS4
September 13, 2012 at 3:21 pm |
CS6 is actually supported, I am actually going to be releasing an update this week that will fix a few localization issues. I will also be releasing installers that will support cs6 without having to manually copy files.
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