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Best practices when working on videos that often require small tweaks after client feedback?
I’m fairly experienced working on small personal projects on after effects, but I recently undertook my first professional project, making a 30sec long animation for the company that I work at. It was enjoyable, but a big problem I ran into throughout it was that I would often have to take hours to make just a few tweaks. After a round of feedback, let’s say they wanted one section to move a little differently, and that change affected the speed at which things happened. I then had to go through and adjust tons and tons of other keyframes to compensate for the change I just made.
I’m beginning work on the second animation for this company now, and I want to avoid that excruciating process. I’m completely self taught in AE, so I feel like I might be missing some basic best practices to avoid this type of problem
If anyone has any tips, tutorials, or videos on this kind of thing that would be great! I’m guessing I just need to get smarter with using precomps or something, but maybe it’s more than that.
Thanks for any help!
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3 Replies
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Maybe far from a “best practice” but precomping the whole thing and time remapping to adjust overall length can be significantly faster than adjusting keyframes on every single layer.
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Change management is one of the hardest parts about successfully delivering a project like this. It’s helpful to try to plan ahead, identifying which elements are most likely to change, and working to reduce the number of other elements dependent on them.
Where appropriate, I like to deliver an animatic as my first pass: essentially, a timed storyboard, without full style/animation. This lets us hit on issues of pacing early on, before changing them becomes difficult or expensive.
I also like to work in self-contained sections to reduce the impact of a change. An edit may require adjusting lots of keyframes within its section, but just sliding other precomps in a master Ae comp, or clips in an editorial timeline.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Dave LaRonde] “You’re stuck in a disfunctional company culture. You’ve got to change that culture FAST or you’ll be driven nuts and consistently miss deadlines if you can’t.”
I must second Dave LaRonde’s argument.
The blame will lie with you even when you maintain a high degree of professionalism and you do everything technically correct. You have to consider whether your compensation is worth maintaining that client. $300 an hour for a psychiatrist much exceeds your $x0 an hour editing.
Wish you all the best. Believe in your talent and your dreams.
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