AE/ExtendScript: Composition not showing up content after change duration

[Andrei Popa]

Are you sure all the layers in the composition are also extended? And you have no time remap on any of the elements?

[Robert Womack]

I’m not sure if I understand your question, but if you’re extending the length of the Comp, you’ll need to loop through the layers and set the outPoint of each layer to the new length of the Comp. If you’re already doing that, can you provide a more concrete example, maybe posting the script?

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

In addition to what Robert wrote – if the layer in your comp is “Comp layer”, when you need to update that comp’s duration AND layers lengths as well. Otherwise – you won’t be able to set outPoint of it. Unless, timeremapping is applied to comp-type layer.

[Junior Ramos]

Yes. All the layers are extended also, ad I’m not using time remapping.
And the problem occurs only with comp layers that already exist in the project or the timeline when I tried to extend the duration.
If I create a comp by script setting the duration, it works normally.
And is recreating the comps via script what I’m doing as a workaround for this.

Below is the method that I use to loop through all the layers inside a comp.

function setLayersDuration(comp, durationValue){
    comp.duration = durationValue;
    comp.startTime = 0;
    comp.outPoint = comp.inPoint + durationValue;
    for(var j=1; j<=comp.layers.length; j++){
        var layer = comp.layers[j];
        if (layer instanceof CompItem){
            $.writeln('we have a CompItem');
            // layer.source.duration = durationValue;
            layer.source.duration = durationValue;
        } else {
            $.writeln('we have a layer');
            layer.outPoint = layer.inPoint + durationValue;
        }
    }
}

[Andrei Popa]

Your function here has some mistakes. It does not go through the layers inside a comp if it finds one, it does not modify the length of the layer source aswell as the layer itself if it finds a comp. I have made some small changes. This worked for me.

function setLayersDuration(comp, durationValue){
    comp.duration = durationValue;
    comp.startTime = 0;
    //comp.outPoint = comp.inPoint + durationValue;
    for(var j=1; j<=comp.layers.length; j++){
        var layer = comp.layers[j];
        if (layer.source instanceof CompItem){
            $.writeln('we have a CompItem');
            // layer.source.duration = durationValue;
            layer.source.duration = durationValue;
            layer.outPoint = durationValue;
            setLayersDuration (layer.source, durationValue)
        } else {
            $.writeln('we have a layer');
            layer.outPoint = layer.inPoint + durationValue;
        }
    }
}

[Junior Ramos]

Hi Andrei.

It worked.
Besides using the method recursively for the case of CompItem, I think that the thing is to set the layer outPoint for the CompItem layer.
But it still weird, because for that case I was setting the outPoint for my comps before calling the method.
Thanks for the help anyways.