How do I get my Prolost Burns, Boardo, Speedramp, or Handcrank work from After Effects into Premiere Pro?

Importing an After Effects composition into Adobe Premiere Pro.

If you try to import an After Effects project that uses the Prolost Presets into Premiere Pro, you'll get an annoying error. Here's the fix, which also happens to be the super cool workfflow for using After Effects compositions in Premiere.

Because the Prolost Presets use expressions, which Premiere doesn’t support, you can’t import your Prolost Burns, Boardo, Speedramp, or Handcrank compositions into Premiere. But you can link them, using Adobe Dynamic Link.

  1. After creating your sequence in After Effects using the Prolost Presets, save the project as usual.
  2. Then open Premiere, and choose File → Adobe Dynamic Link → Import After Effects Composition…
  3. Navigate to your After Effects project file in the Import window, and select it. You should see your After Effects compositions on the right. Choose the composition you want to import, and click OK.
  4. The selected After Effects composition will be added to your Premiere Pro project, and you can now edit it into your sequence.

The imported composition maintains a link to the After Effects project, so you can continue to make changes in After Effects, and they will update instantly in Premiere. But After Effects doesn’t have to be open when working with the imported composition in Premiere.

Or Skip the Import Dialog and Drag and Drop

Dan Wilk of Adobe helpfully pointed out that you can drag an After Effects composition right into an open Premiere Pro project:

How do I use Prolost Boardo with my own storyboard templates?

Prolost Boardo is designed to work with any kind of storyboard images. There are some presets and templates for iPad drawing apps I like, but you can easily use it with any storyboard images from any source.

When drawing storyboards, it's useful to have some extra room around the frame guide, so that you can draw a little more of the scene than is strictly covered by the camera. This gives you a little extra room to draw your shot, and the extra drawing comes in handy when creating camera moves with Boardo.

Since any storyboard template could have a different amount of extra room around the frame guide, Boardo allows you to set up scale and position offsets, so that at the default settings, your shots will be properly framed.

Configuring Boardo to work with a storyboard template is as simple as adjusting these offsets so that the image within the frame guide is properly framed in the After Effects comp. The following are step-by-step instructions for customizing Boardo to work with your own storyboard template.

Draw With a Template

Let's say you want to draw your storyboards in Photoshop using a Wacom Cintiq. You create a template that is, say, 2,000 pixels wide, and 1,500 pixels tall. Centered within that, you draw your frame guide — a 16:9 (or whichever aspect ratio is appropriate for your project) rectangle on its own layer, slightly smaller than the 2,000-pixel width of the document. You'll draw your storyboards underneath that layer, and export them without the guide.

Tip: It doesn't matter where you draw your storyboards, but central to the design of Boardo is that you draw them using a framing guide that doesn't export with the drawings. So either choose a layered drawing app like Photoshop or Sketchbook Pro, or an app with a built-in template/custom paper feature, such as Noteshelf.

Export Your Template for Reference

You'll export your storyboard frames without the framing guide, but for setting up Boardo, you should export one image, at the same size as your storyboard frames, that includes the frame guide.

Import the Template Into After Effects

Import your template frame into After Effects and add it to a comp of the resolution you plan on using for your storyboards. See the User's Guide for a detailed list of recommended resolutions.

Apply Prolost Boardo to the Template Layer

The layer will change position and scale, but probably won't line up correctly yet.

Do not touch any of the Start or End Pan, Tilt, or Zoom controls. Leave them at their defaults.

Adjust the Setup Values to Fit the Template to the Comp

At the bottom of the Boardo controls, twirl open the Setup group. Here you'll find three controls: Scale Offset, Horizontal Offset, and Vertical Offset.

Use these to adjust the size and position of the layer, until the frame guide in your template lines up with the edges of the comp.

Tip: If your frame guide is centered, you can leave Horizontal Offset and Vertical Offset at zero. Scale Offset should be all you'll have to adjust.

Copy and Paste

Apply Boardo to all your shots. Copy the settings from the one you calibrated, and paste into the other shots.

That's it! Now all your shots are framed correctly, and you can start animating your board-o-matic.

Why am I asked to pre-authorize future payments?

When you pay using PayPal, you may see a scary message about pre-authorizing future payments. This is PayPal's confusingly-worded, but typical, way of working with online stores — in this case Gumroad, which powers the Prolost Store.

What it means is that if you choose to create a Gumroad account after your purchase, and choose to save your payment information in your Gumroad account, then the next time you buy something from Gumroad, you won't have to re-enter your PayPal login information.

Why does the Prolost Store charge VAT?

The Prolost Store runs on an e-commerce platform called Gumroad. According to Gumroad's help article on the subject, VAT regulations require digital marketplaces such as theirs to collect VAT. Gumroad is the entity with which you are doing business, so they are responsible for collecting VAT, not Prolost.

If you do not have to pay VAT, Gumroad says you may request a VAT credit directly from them.

I tried to pay with PayPal and it didn’t work.

This happens sometimes, but not often. I’m sorry it happened to you! You were always my favorite.

If your PayPal payment failed, here are some things to try:

  • Reload the page and try again. Maybe wave a rubber chicken over the screen a few times.
  • Turn off any ad blockers you might be running. They can interfere with the purchasing overlay. Don't worry, I'm not running any skeezy tracking crap on this site, but I do need to run one line of Javascript to make the buy buttons work. Here's my privacy policy.
  • Try your purchase again in a different browser.
  • Check with PayPal to make sure there's not a block on your account.
  • Carrier pigeon.

If none of that works, visit the Prolost Gumroad page. There you can buy using PayPal without any of the overlay code I use here.

If that doesn't work, contact me directly.

When I remove an After Effects preset from my layer, I get expression errors.

Yeah, this is a bummer.

When you delete the preset from a layer, you're actually only deleting the "pseudo-effect" containing the sliders and other controls. Often, there are expressions on the layer that are linked to these controls. You delete the effect, the expression can't find the controls, so they throw errors.

Here are two ways to completely remove a preset from a layer in After Effects:

Undo

If you apply a preset and then undo it, you'll be right back where you started, with no expressions.

Disable the Expressions Manually

After deleting the preset effect, select the layer and press EE (press E twice in rapid succession) to reveal all properties with expressions.

On each one, click the = equals sign button to turn the expression off: ≠