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Time remap issue – losing rotation animation in a nested element
Hi all. Thanks for viewing this thread.
I am fairly new to After Effects (but not to Adobe products). I have been playing around with Video Copilot tutorials and have just finished the earth zoom tutorial (https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom). It’s a great tutorial and worked well, however I decided to make some adjustments to it. Namely, instead of using a screen grab of the earth from Google Earth, I used an earth map and an atmospheric clouds map and used the CC Sphere effect in AE to create an earth and atmosphere that continues to rotate after the animation has completely zoomed out. Of note, the earth and the atmospheric clouds are in their own comps where I have animated their rotations in the CC Sphere box. They are nested in my main Zoom comp and I have the Zoom comp inside a Time Remap comp (where I’ve also done the slider expression and added sound). I hope that’s clear.
My problem:
In order to make the entire zooming sequence ease in and out properly, I had to time remap the Zoom composition (with all of the layers, including the earth and atmospheric clouds nested comps) and set those start and end keyframes to easy ease. But, since I have set it up so that the earth and atmospheric clouds continue to rotate AFTER the zoom, it has caused some keyframing issues, in that the earth and clouds gradually slow down as per the easy ease and then gradually start up to rotate afterwards to complete the rotations. This is obviously not a very realistic look.The good news is that the earth rotates so slowly it’s not noticeable. However, the clouds look like they slow down and start up again after the zoom completes. I have tried so many workarounds and, other than pulling the clouds comp out of the main comp and keyframing each frame into place, I am out of ideas. I remember Flash used to maintain whatever animation properties were within its instance no matter where you dropped it. Does AE not do the same? Since the CC Sphere rotation is in the clouds comp and not the zoom comp, why is the rotation being affected by the time remap?
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I am totally out of ideas. Thanks!
Shaun
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7 Replies
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Instead of time-remapping the whole comp, you could apply easy-ease directly to the properties you wish to ease and leave the others linear.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Thanks for the response, but I didn’t have much luck with it. All of the layers are parented to the main layer and scaled exponentially to create the zoom effect. Adjusting each layer changes all of the scales and timing. And I just need the beginning of the zoom and end of the zoom to ease.
I just need to understand why the rotation of the clouds in its own composition is being affected by the time remap. There must be a way to lock the animation within the cloud comp so that anything that’s animated in it is not affected by the remap. Help!
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Oh, I see — you’re saying that the clouds are being affected by the time remapping, but that they are not part of the comp to which time-remapping has been applied?
Sorry, it’s a little hard for me to follow without seeing your UI or project file.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
It is part of the comp. Here’s the layout:
Zoom Comp:
– Set of google earth images all parented to the first image, each as its own layer in the comp. The scaling property is assigned to the parent only and is set to exponential scale.
– A bunch of noise layers also linked to the parent that act as clouds when zooming out (as per the Video Copilot tutorial).
– Nested comp of the earth slightly rotating (technically affected by the issue I am having but since it rotates so slowly it’s not noticeable). Also parented to the first layer to take on the scaling property.
– Nested comp of atmospheric clouds rotating. Also parented to the first layer. The atmospheric clouds comp only has a rotation set in the CC Sphere property. I was hoping this property would not be affected by the time remap.Time Remap Comp:
– Contains the Zoom comp with an easy ease set for the beginning and for 6 seconds into the project (at which point the earth is fully zoomed out and rotating). The total length of the project is 10 seconds, so I want an additional 4 seconds of earth and atmosphere rotating.Sorry for the confusion.
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When Time Remap is applied to a comp, the entire composition is treated like a single piece of footage, and everything within it is re-sampled temporally, according to your time-remapping property animation.
There is no way to exclude part of that comp from time-remapping, and I don’t think that time-remapping is really your best solution here.
What you might do is use more time-remapping to speed up the layer you want to preserve within the comp, so that when it’s slowed down outside of the comp it actually just returns to normal speed.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Thanks, that’s a great idea! I’ll have to play with it. I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂
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I think this worked after all! I played with the cloud composition’s graph editor to adjust the rotation and it seems to have paid off. Thanks for the ideas!
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