The final step to my post production workflow is to export the final timeline to After Effects to do a colour grade, plus transitions and crossfades etc. Why wouldn’t I just do it in Premiere Pro or Avid or Final Cut? Because AE lets you work in 32bit colour space which is important for quality and all that techno stuff that I can’t really be bothered explaining (The DV rebel’s guide book explains it well, so does the author’s blog).

The only problem is to do a colour grade, you’d often need to separate all the cuts into separate clips so you can adjust each clip to match each other and so on. This is easy to do if you have Premiere Pro or the Automatic Duck plugin but sometimes I just want to export one movie file out of my editor of choice and have AE separate the cuts into separate clips and layers for me.

Here is where “Magnum the Edit Detector” script comes in. Lloyd Alvarez is the creator of this script and I can’t mention how thankful I am to him for creating it and handing it out for free! This would have come in handy too many times to count in the past. I tested it on my old music video that I had previously posted and it managed to find and separate 220 cuts in under 4 minutes! It sometimes did a cut where a clip had sped up but apart from that it works flawlessly! Once again, kudos to Lloyd for making such a genius script.

Magnum the Edit Detector

And if you wanted other handy AE scripts that will make your life so much easier, check out these sites:

http://aescripts.com/ – Lloyd Alvarez’s site
http://www.aenhancers.com/ – A forum with plenty of scripts and expressions.
http://www.redefinery.com/blog/ – Site by Jeff Almasol. Another AE scripting genius with plenty of handy scripts available here.