Cinema 4D - Likes After Effects

Cinema 4D has a rich compositing features and a wealth of library extensions and plugins. The creators at Cinema 4D have also recognized the special features and wealth of possibilities within Adobe’s After Effects. The two have collaborated on special file set, making it easier for you to blend the two platforms. In May of this year Adobe released their 64 bit version of After Effects and Premiere Pro bringing remarkable new capability in memory usage and render time. Some might say Cinema4D and After Effects were meant to work together.

When you are setting your render options in your Cinema file beginning with the ‘Output’ settings, be sure and change the default ‘Frame Range’ from ‘current frame’ to your desired range. Most often it will be ‘All Frames’ to render the complete project but you can set it to the preview range you have been working with, you can set a manual range where you enter a subset of the total frames. This is a great option if you are focusing on a certain segment of your project and want to render and view or, in this case, create a file for After Effects. This is also a great option if you have a large project and want to render in segments to reduce a large render time.

Now choose the ‘Save’ render tab in the render settings. Of course you check the ‘Save’ check box, under ‘File’ you enter the project file name (you could use another to have multiple render file sets). Under format there are many image file options but there’s a good chance you want one of the movie options: Microsoft ‘avi’, or Apple’ Quicktime’. Quicktime seems to be the choice of many graphics and 3D developers. Both of these movie types have further options with regard to quality, compression, and frame rate. Be sure and check these values to be compatible with the final destination you desire.

Now for the fun part. I nearly always choose the ‘Alpha Channel’ box. Why? This creates an alpha layer for your output. When you mix this in with other objects in After Effects you only see the contents of this movie. You don’t see the little rectangular box defining this movie size and this layer in your After Effects projects doesn’t obscure any of the other layers, shapes and objects in your After Effects project. They all blend as if created on their own layer in the same file.

Below your ‘Regular Image’ selection set you see a configuration set called ‘Composition Project File’. When you open this set there again is a save check box you should choose. The ‘Target Application’ defaults to After Effects, there are other options. There is a box for ‘Include 3D Data’. My impulse is to say you should nearly always say yes because this will preserve your different settings that are related to 3D such as lighting and cameras. When you import this data into After Effects, you will see these same objects on their own layers and be able to manipulate and adjust them in After Effects. If you included tracking and target information in Cinema 4D, you will this tracking information on you camera layer as animation of position or point of interest if you tracked an object.

Now click ‘Save Project File’, enter the name of the output file but it really should match the name of your render file. I’ve always understood that to keep any special relationships correct, such as 3D data, your AE project file must match the Cinema 4D render.

Now, render your file. When it is complete you will see an After Effects file type in the path you defined, an ‘AEC’ file. With After Effects installed you should actually see the familiar AE file type icon. You can double click on this file and it will launch After Effects.

Once in After Effects you see the file name of your project render as a After Effects composition. When you click on this composition, you will see the render output on it’s own layer but if you included 3D data, you will also see any lights, cameras you created in Cinema 4D on their own layer in AE. Here you can adjust them, change their tracking and position, blend their effects with AE objects and layer in your final AE comp.

The steps and tools provided by Cinema make this really easy and easy to adapt to special needs such as a partial render. Try creating a project with lights and cameras so you can see how they come out on their own layers in After Effects. It is really quite cool!