As all motion graphic artists know, client approvals are a regular occurrence in our day to day jobs. In most cases, they can become quite a cumbersome task if the client is not sitting right next to you, and their direction is clear, you can never be really sure exactly what or where they want something revised. In today's tutorial, I'm going to show you a very simple, yet highly effective way to get detailed notes back from your client in a way that will make doing revisions very, very easy.

Now, as you can see from the image below, I am in After Effects, and I have one comp with some footage on it and a blur effect, and I want to send this file off to a client to get some feedback on what they think, and what they want revised.



Much like any other "final" project, we are going to render this out, but instead of rendering out a normal Quicktime or TGA sequence, what we are going to do is render it out as an Adobe Clip Note file. How you do that is simple. First, drag your comp into the render queue, and make sure that your "Render Settings" are set to your liking. Then, click on your "Output Module", and here is where we are going to set up a PDF file, so our client can approve the animation using Adobe's Clip Notes. Once the Output Module is open, select "Adobe Clip Notes" under "Format".



Then, click "Format Options" under "Video Output.



You can now go in and change your preference to your liking. What is going to happen is that After Effects is going to embed your timeline into a PDF file, for your client to see. For my main "Export Settings", I am going to disable the audio, since my timeline has none, and I'm going to use a preset for my video of 512kbps from the "Preset" dropdown. If you take a look at the "Comments" box, you will see that After Effects has put in some information to help you out here. What is says is "Set frame size to 320 x 240 pixels in the Stretch options in Output Module before encoding". The reason for this is that you want to make sure that your video is in the 4x3 aspect ratio when your clients view it, so make sure you set your "Stretch" parameter in your "Output Module" to be 320x240.



As you can see below in the Export window there are a few tabs, and since we are going to e-mail this file and have the video embedded in it, there are really only three that you need to worry about which are "Video", "Audio" and "Clip Notes". First, we can eliminate "Audio", as we have none, but if you did, this is where you could set the frequency and output channels. Next, we will look at "Video", and our only parameter that we can change is the video quality, and since this is for screening purposes, and will be e-mailed, I'm going to keep the file size small and put it around 1000 kbps.



Finally, we have the "Clip Notes" tab, which is were I can set a password for the file, and for the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to input "KEVIN" as my password. Next, there are instructions that explain to your client how this works, and what they need to do to get the approvals back to you, and finally, you can input your e-mail address in the "Return Comments to" box. We're now ready to render. Click "OK" in the "Adobe Clip Notes" box, then click "OK" in the "Output Module Settings". Now set your render destination, and click "Render".

Once the file is done rendering, navigate to where you rendered it, which for me is the Desktop, and take a look at it. We now have a 2.7 megabyte PDF file that we can easily e-mail to our client. Now I know what you are thinking. How does our client look at this and send us their comments? Well, let's take a look. First, double click on the PDF file to open Adobe Reader. Once you double click, you will be immediately greeted by a window asking you for a password (which we entered back in After Effects). So, I will input "KEVIN" into the password box, and Reader will open.



Next, a window will open giving your client the instructions that you input (or left the same) in After Effects.



Once the PDF file is open, the first thing your client should do is put their name into the "Reviewer's Name" box. Once their name is input, they will immediately see it appear in the below dialogue box. Now, all your client has to do is watch your timeline, and when they get to a point that they want to enter information, simply stop the timeline, and enter their comments. They don't need to enter timecode information as Adobe Reader does everything for them. If your client wants to see what comments they have entered, they can simply use the drop down arrow beside "Go To" to see all their comments, and the associated timecode. To jump to a comment, they can use the forward and backwards arrows for easy navigation. Once they are done, they can press "Save", and then "Export". Adobe Reader will prompt them to save a .XFDF file to a location of their choice, and they can then e-mail the file back to you. As you can see, the .XFDF file is a whopping 12kb, so they don't have to worry about size limitations when sending it back to you.

Once you have the file, open your project in After Effects, select your composition, and then navigate your way to FILE>IMPORT>ADOBE CLIP NOTES COMMENTS. Once you select the file and import it, you will immediately notice that all the comments that the client had entered in the PDF document have appeared as markers in After Effects with their name beside it. That means that if multiple people look at the file and make comments (assuming they put their name in Adobe Reader like they should), all of their comments will appear when you import the different clip notes. Something to keep in mind is that this works in reverse as well. Any markers that you have on your timeline before you export the file will appear in Adobe Reader for your client to see. This is a great way of pointing out something important that you want them to look at.



There is one thing that I want to point out that is very important about using After Effects and Adobe Clip notes for approvals, and that is that there is a bug in After Effects that causes all of your footage to be stretched to be 16x9, even though your footage might be 4x3. I brought this up with the After Effects production team, and they informed me that this is a bug in only After Effects, and doing the same process from Premiere Pro CS3 works fine. The workaround for this is to put your 4x3 comp into a 16x9 comp with black bars on the left and right side, and now go through the same process as above, and you should be all set to go!

Using Adobe's Clip Notes is a great and easy way to send motion graphics from After Effects for your client to quickly and easily approve or add comments to. Remember that this works not only in After Effects, but Premier Pro CS3 as well. If there is anything you would like to know about After Effects or motion graphics in general, feel free to drop me a line at kevin@reelclever.com, and maybe your question will be the topic of my next article.