• Adobe After Effects

  Replacing footage – making clip independent — NOT globally changed

  Posted by Danny Greer on August 3, 2009 at 7:23 pm

  Hey there.

  I’ve created a comp with a bunch of different images keyframed.

  Now what I’d like to do is duplicate the comp and reconnect those pics to other pics that are the same size….maintaining the same motion as the first comp.

  However, I don’t want to make the images change in the original sequence when I replace the footage in the second one.

  In FCP, you can choose “make independent clip” and then replace footage. I was curious if something like this is possible in AE. I’m trying to avoid copying a ton of keyframes.

  Any ideas? Thanks AEers!
  dg

  danny greer
  dallas, texas
  http://www.dannygreer.com

  David Johnson replied 17 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Adolfo Rozenfeld

  August 3, 2009 at 8:42 pm

  If you duplicate a Comp in the project panel, it is automatically independent from the original. If you duplicate a nested Comp in the timeline, it’s just an instance of the same Comp.

  For footage items, if you apply the Replace command, all instances are changed. But if you select the layer you want to replace, and option/alt-drag from the project panel to that specific layer, only that specific instance gets its’ source changed.

  Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
• 

  Danny Greer

  August 3, 2009 at 8:56 pm

  Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate the help.
  dg

  danny greer
  dallas, texas
  http://www.dannygreer.com
• 

  David Johnson

  August 4, 2009 at 12:35 am

  The way Dave & Adolfo explained are definitely the best ways … I’ll just add another option that’s useful with tons of layers and/or versions. It’s much harder to explain than to do so it’s actually very easy with good use of Windows Explorer or Mac Finder and cheap or free batch rename software (i.e., BetterFileRename).

  Create a folder structure on your hard drive for version copies of a master AE project in folders with all the images for each version.

  Name copies of all the first images for each version using the same file names (i.e., 001.psd) and continue with the second, third, etc.

  Put the version folders inside inside ZIP files with distinguishable names, which is really only a single right click away on either platform so its not so bad even if you have tons of versions.

  Take each version (and its images) out of their ZIPs one at a time so that AE only finds the images for that version and has everything in place without replacing any media. Then, render and move on to the next version. It’s also helpful to to embed a copy of each version’s project file in its MOV, if that’s what you’re rendering to.

  I hope the way I tried to explain that makes sense.

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