• Adobe After Effects

  Managing timing changes across comps

  Posted by Zack Mulvaney on May 15, 2011 at 9:55 pm

  I’m editing a rough cut of animation done by someone other than me (who I don’t have access to). For the most part, this person animated all the text in one comp and all the images in another. I need to adjust the timing of the images comp, but don’t have a good workflow approach in mind for making sure any timing tweaks I make to the image comp are carried-over to the text comp.

  For example, let’s say I want to insert 10 more seconds of text after the first five seconds of the clip (0:00:05:00). This means I would also want to insert 10 more seconds after the first five seconds of the image clip (so that might next text doesn’t “bump” into existing animation on the image comp). Does anyone have a good workflow approach rather than going back and forth between the comps and manually making the adjustments?

  (PS – the reason I’m annoyed is because I feel that this would be very easily to do if the text and images were all in the same comp — unless there is something I don’t know about the virtues of separating text and image comps…maybe I’m just a newb)

  Walter Soyka replied 15 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  May 15, 2011 at 10:07 pm

  I think you could copy/paste the layers for each comp into a new comp. It won’t effect anything in the other comps, so it’s worth a try.

  Otherwise you may need to work in both comps.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Zack Mulvaney

  May 15, 2011 at 11:27 pm

  k – thx – i’ll give it a try.

  btw, am I wrong, or is that an absurd way to animate….? (with the separate text/image comps) For the life of me, I cant think of any advantage to this method…
• 

  Kevin Camp

  May 16, 2011 at 1:46 am

  [Zack Mulvaney] ” For the life of me, I cant think of any advantage to this method…”

  there are times when you need to precomp layers. not knowing anything about what’s going on in the comps it’s hard to say why they are in precomps.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Walter Soyka

  May 16, 2011 at 11:22 am

  [Kevin Camp] “Otherwise you may need to work in both comps.”

  And if you must work in both comps, you can add new Viewer windows (see the ETLAT [edit this, look at that] section [link] of the viewer documentation), and tear off the comp timelines into separate windows, so that everything in both comps will be visible at all times.

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
  Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

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