• Adobe After Effects

  Cropping without centering

  Posted by Gary Frewin on September 16, 2011 at 1:25 pm

  Hi all,

  I’ve got a 57 layer psd which I would like to import into after effects. Each layer represents a cross section of a molecule, and so I am using AE to spread them evenly along the Z axis.

  However, without cropping this really slow down my pc, but with cropping it centers all the layers relative to each other rather than cropping a layer and leaving it in place relative to the other.

  Does this description make sense? Is there a way to crop a psd import and preserve the X-Y position of the layers relative to each other?

  Many thanks
  Gary

  Gary Frewin replied 14 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Michael Szalapski

  September 16, 2011 at 3:06 pm

  Are you importing as a composition? Then opening that composition? It should work just fine with cropped layers. (Since you’re saying “cropped” I’m assuming you’re using a version of AE older than 10/CS5)

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

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• 

  Gary Frewin

  September 18, 2011 at 9:50 am

  Hi, thanks for the reply. It helped me realize my mistake. I’ll note it here for anyone looking in future. 🙂

  I am using CS4, and simply importing the psd file to the project as ‘composition – croppedlayers’.

  My problem was that rather than opening the composition I imported, I was copying all the layers from the Project Panel into a new composition (this resulted in all the layers becoming centered).

  What I needed to do was open the composition that was created by AE when I imported the PSD. In that composition, all the layers were aligned properly.

  Many thanks

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