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Chain animation – How to get all layers to move at once
Hi,
This is probably a ridiculously simple query, but I’m animating a simple chain, moving from right to left, halting in the middle of the screen. I am then zooming into each link in the chain, at which point a new video will play. After the video finishes I will zoom back out to the full chain again, to then zoom into the one to the right and so on. I currently have each link as a seperate layer and am animating them one layer at a time, one keyframe at a time. This seems a very long winded way of doing it, but, new to AE as I am, I’m unsure of how I can link the layers in order to get them all to follow the same path at the same time. I’ve tried the AE FAQ for this, but found nothing to help.
I’ve tried to use parenting, but this seems to make every link move to the same position etc, and so ruins the animation. I’ve looked into expressions, but this seems pretty complicated for a noob such as myself. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. I’ve linked to the first stage of the animation to give you an idea as to exactly what I’m trying to do. Please excuse the messiness, early stages and all that!
Cheers,
Jamie…
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4 Replies
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You want to parent them all to a master layer. Note that I said “parent” not “pick whip the position propery”.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Hey Michael,
Yeah, I tried parenting, but the layers took on all the properties of the parent layer rather than just selected ones. I only want them all to scale in/out at the same rate, not to move to the same position, because as I zoom on the chain, those to the left and/or right of the one that fills the screen will all need to be in different positions in reference to the central one. When I parented them to it, they went to the same position also. Hope this makes sense! Maybe I didn’t explain properly what I wanted them to do…
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See if the tutorial here helps -> https://library.creativecow.net/articles/drozda_jerzy/CGSnake.php
HTH
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Asia.
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It kind of helped, yeah, insofar as it demystified Expressions a little for me. I now have everything linked by expressions and zooming together, but can’t for the life of me find an easy way to have the positional transformation without keyframing everything one at a time, which will take forever!
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