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start/stop/loop nested animation / composition the smart way? (like in flash?)
Hello I am a Flash Animator who also uses Adobe After Effects. Now in Flash I can loop Graphic Clips (they work like compositions. I can animate the position of a graphic clip while the entire graphic is looping or then I can let it display just ONE so it holds that frame or I stop the animation.
Is it possible to have so much control over a composition in After Effects?Here is what I am doing and what I have done and I feel like the way I did this is HORRIBLE and there must be a BETTER more elegant way:
I have a composition of a hand holding a pen that’s drawing around. It’s just 2 keyframes where I have animated the rotation and then I’ve added an expression (PINGPONG) to that rotation so that it loops.
Then I put my “movinhhand.composition” into my main composition and animated it’s position over a piece of paper so that it goes to a position and then it starts drawing something. Of course I do NOT want to play the animation of the hand moving drawing around yet because it isn’t drawing yet but moving around on the piece of paper. SO I added a freeze frame to it so that no animation gets played. The still (because of the freeze frame) of that arm/hand with the pencil moves to the position where it’s supposed to start drawing then I CUT my composition in half / split it with CMD SHIFT D and I remove the freeze frame from the new duplicate/layer of my hand animation so that the animation will start playing.
Thats how I have done it. If I let the hand draw a lot of stuff and make it move around a lot where it doesn’t draw anything I will end up with a lot of layers: One layer with the animation playing and one layer of the hand that has a freeze frame applied to it.
I feel like that’s a terrible workflow and I would be 100 times faster in Flash but I am sure I just didn’t come up with a better solution yet. Do you have any idea? THANKS A LOT!
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2 Replies
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Instead of using freeze frames and splitting the layer, use Layer>Time>Enable Time Remap(cntl+alt+t). You can put in create your own freeze frame by adding a keyframe when you want the frame frozen, copy the keyframe, select the keyframe and the last keyframe(AE creates a start/end keyframe when you remap) and move them down the timeline(this maintains the normal speed, then pasting the copied keyframe where you want the freeze to start.
Sounds a bit complicated, but the trick is to maintain the normal speed, so you need to be very vigilant about moving all the keyframes after your freeze frame.
I made a simple example project where I took a 30 second timer, froze it twice for 5 seconds, and then had it start again to illustrate the technique.
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb. -
WOW! Thanks A LOT for even making an example file. Thats really great. Thanks for this. Now in Flash I can simply say: display frame this and display frame that. what would be the best way to do this in AE?
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