• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Getting parent of Precomp, and Stereoscopic workflow?

  Posted by Rasika Jayawardene on April 5, 2013 at 6:24 am

  Am doing this stereoscopic project within aftereffects, and is using the current 3D camera setup which is bundled within AE CS6. This system is fine, but am running into problems when trying to incorporate footage that was rendered in 3D and converted from 2D to 3D. Currently, I am overcoming this issue by having a switch at the beginning to swap between the Left and the Right during render time. However, I have no way of previewing the comp in the given anaglyph modes.

  1. What is the method of finding the name of the parent composition of a precomp from within a nested sequence of comps via a script . From what I read, this was said to be impossible. Asking again, to make sure :D.

  the thisComp.parent only returns the parent layer, and not the parent comp. Is there any way to do this?

  2. Are there any other proper and true stereoscopic tools I can use, that support true left and right input and a proper comped preview mode. I almost always use Nuke for my stereo work, but this specific project is a heavy motion graphics project, and must be done within AE.

  Thankx

  Mitch Mann replied 13 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  April 5, 2013 at 2:16 pm

  The issue of course is that a precomp can have more than one “parent” comp. With expressions, there’s no mechanism that I know of for retrieving those. In scripting, you can use the .usedIn attribute, which returns an array of all the comps that another comp (or footage item) occurs in.

  Dan
• 

  Mitch Mann

  May 8, 2013 at 10:18 pm

  You could write a script that goes through all of project and sets a value to the parent comp name. (Or the first parent comp it comes to if there are more than one.) When the script comes to some kind of keyword in your expression, it could replace it with the parent’s comp name (making use of “.usedIn”). You’d probably want your expression to have error catching for when you haven’t run this script yet. You’d have to run the script every time it needed to be updated, then it would work. That’s the high level idea, the coding might get tricky. I did something like this a few years ago, but I couldn’t find the code for you.

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