QCBridgeAE for After Effects and Premiere Pro

QCBridgeAE is a Mercury Transmit plugin that streams live viewport output from the the AE or Premiere to QCView. The output is unaltered and full float, converted to 1/2 float in QCView so the image quality is preserved under all circumstances, including HDR scenarios.

Requirements

QCView 2.4.0 or newer on the same machine.
After Effects or Premiere Pro with Mercury Transmit (any current release).
macOS on Apple Silicon, or Windows x64.

Installation

Quit After Effects and Premiere Pro first. Download the installer from the QCBridgeAE releases:

macOS: QCBridgeAE-<version>-arm64.pkg
Windows: QCBridgeAE-<version>-Setup-x64.exe

Updating is the same step with a newer installer.

Setup

In After Effects: Settings → Video Preview

QCView player window

Tick Enable Mercury Transmit, then tick QCBridgeAE → QCView.
Untick “Disable video output when in the background”. With it ticked (the default), After Effects stops sending the moment you click into QCView — QCView shows PAUSED and names this setting.

In Premiere Pro: Settings → Playback — the same two ticks, and the same background setting to untick.

In QCView: File → Connect to After Effects (or Connect to Premiere Pro). The source appears in the Live bin as QCBridge After Effects / QCBridge Premiere Pro and waits until the host is sending.

QCView player window

Set QCView’s OCIO input to your project’s working space. The pixels arrive in the host’s working colour space, untransformed. With Adobe colour management that is the project’s working space; with OCIO colour management, the OCIO working space (for example ACEScg).

What to expect

Frames are RGBA16F. The host sends 32-bit float; values above 1.0 and negatives are kept, and nothing is clamped.
After Effects flattens transparency over the comp background colour, so its frames are opaque. Premiere Pro carries straight alpha.
Mercury Transmit is always a few frames behind AE (Just how it works and shares the same issue with Blackmagic, Aja, or other plugins), but Premiere is fairly tightly synced — depending on system resources and timeline resolution.
You can stream from AE and Premiere at the same time and between them, or use them in QCView Dual View review modes.

QCView player window