by Brad » Fri Aug 16, 2013 10:37 am
While Pwolf is right, it's not really MEANT for editing, it can certainly do it. I actually just cut our company's reel in AE (but to be fair, it's because I didn't have Premiere installed on my machine at the time. Coincidentally enough, as I just typed that sentence, the Adobe Creative Cloud manager just popped up the "Adobe Premiere Pro CC has been installed" notification)?
Basically how you want to do it is, import your footage, have a Composition that is the same dimensions/frame rate as your footage. This is basically your "Sequence" comp, or where you're going to have your music and edited clips. Then, if you double-click on a piece of Footage in your Project bin, it'll open it up in a Footage window. Then, you can set In and Out points (by either hitting the { and } buttons in the window, or hitting Alt + [ or ]), and then click the "Overlay Edit" button beneath the preview. This will put the clip into the Sequence comp. You'll need to shift it around to time up where you need it to be (use the [ and ] keys in the timeline window to snap the clip to your current time)? This is definitely going to feel like a weird workflow if you're used to Vegas and Premiere because each clip will be it's own layer, but it is something you can do if you get used to it.
As far as working with EDLs ("Edit Decision Lists" which is what a .aaf is), it can be a bit tricky, as there are so many proprietary EDL formats. But assuming it works exactly as it's meant to, you import the EDL, it imports all the clips you used in your editing program and sets the Ins and Outs of all the clips in a new Comp for you, along with things like speed changes and what-have-you. Unfortunately the reality is, it rarely works perfectly and you end up having to tweak it a shitload.
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