Working between Final Cut and After Effects

With what kind of footage and what kind of settings in FCP will you work? SD or HD? Also what are the versions of FCP and AE you have at your disposal?

 

Keep everything saved in AIC. Massive files, but you should be able to move between AE and FCP with relative ease. Ideally, you'd do as much editing as possible before sending to AE to minimize how many times you send it back and forth.

Alternate solution: this is more work, but has potentially higher quality results. When you're ready to export to AE, do so. Set up all your effects and whatnot. Before exporting, disable the video layer (the footage that you're adding effects to) and export the whole video as an alpha-channeled video. Bring that video back into FCP and overlay it on the footage. If you included the entire footage in the timeline, it should match up perfectly.

That's simply to avoid re-saving to AIC each time you want to go back and forth. AIC shouldn't suffer re-saving compression artifacts to begin with, but if you're paranoid, that's a way to do it.

 

if you have the budget, you can get Automatic Duck FCP/AE Export. We used this for a ton of Avid and FCP projects.