In the past, sharing media assets among post-production applications has required you to render your work in one application before importing it into another—an inefficient and time-consuming workflow. If you wanted to make changes in the original application, you had to rerender the asset. Multiple rendered versions of an asset consume disk space and can lead to file-management challenges.

Adobe Dynamic Link, a feature of Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium, offers an alternative to this workflow: the ability to create dynamic links, without rendering, between new or existing compositions in Adobe After Effects and either Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Encore. Creating a dynamic link is as simple as importing any other type of asset, and dynamically linked compositions appear with unique icons and label colors to help you identify them. Dynamic links are saved as part of the Adobe Premiere Pro or Encore project.

Changes you make to a dynamically linked composition in After Effects appear immediately in the linked files in Adobe Premiere Pro or Encore; you don’t have to render the composition or even save changes first.

When you link to an After Effects composition, it appears in the target component’s Project panel. You can use the linked composition as you would any other asset. When you insert a linked composition into the target component’s timeline, a linked clip, which is simply a reference to the linked composition in the Project panel, appears in the Timeline panel. After Effects renders the linked composition on a frame‑by‑frame basis during playback in the target application.

• In Adobe Premiere Pro, you can preview the linked composition in the Source Monitor, set In and Out points, add it to a sequence, and use any of the Adobe Premiere Pro tools to edit it. When you add a linked composition that contains both footage and audio layers to a sequence, Adobe Premiere Pro inserts linked video and audio clips in the timeline. (You can unlink these to edit them separately; search for “Unlink video and audio” in Adobe Premiere Pro Help.)

• In Encore, you can use the linked composition to create a motion menu or insert it into a timeline, and use any of the Adobe Encore tools to edit it. When you add a linked composition that contains both video and audio layers to an Encore timeline, Encore inserts separate video and audio clips in the timeline.

Other ways to share content among Production Premium components include copying and pasting between After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro, exporting After Effects projects to Adobe Premiere Pro, using the Capture In Adobe Premiere Pro command in After Effects, creating After Effects compositions from Encore menus, or importing Adobe Premiere Pro projects into After Effects. For more information, see the relevant component’s Help.

For a tutorial on Adobe Dynamic Link, see www.adobe.com/go/learn_dv_tutorial_dynlink.