• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  change source text in a precomp from outside of that precomp

  Posted by Maciej Urbanek on December 16, 2012 at 6:09 am

  I have a box animation with a letter within (precomped)- which is a composition reused many times on 1 timeline.

  – I want to change the letters within my precomps directly from the main timeline, so that i don’t have to duplicate the precomps in the project – but simply change the layer names of the precomps in the main timeline.

  when i use this expression on the source text:
  thisComp.name
  i am able to get the source name only – but not the layer name of the precomp.
  is there a way to address text source from outside of a composition?

  Maciej Urbanek replied 13 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  December 16, 2012 at 7:33 am

  I don’t think you can do that the way that you are attempting (by duplicating the precomp as a layer). If you could, you’d have different instances of the same precomp rendering differently, which (as far as I know) isn’t possible. I think you have to duplicate the comp in the project window so each copy has its own name and render result.

  Dan
• 

  Maciej Urbanek

  December 16, 2012 at 9:12 am

  Thought it would be pretty helpful, and time saving to be able to use just one precomped animation for multiple texts.

  But as you said it’s probably got something to do withe the way AE renders compositions.

  Thanks – I won’t be wasting any more time looking for this solution

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