Compositing Question

[Stephen Smith]

I think you need to ask yourself how complicated is this project and how fast is your computer? I’ve been able to build almost everything with out having to export part of it and then bring it back into the project. Pre-comping can keep things better organized and help you move a bunch of stuff easily. Here is a link to my YouTube channel if you want to get an idea of how complex the projects get that I have worked on: https://www.youtube.com/lonepeakproductions
Hope this helps and best of luck.

Stephen Smith
Utah Video Productions

Check out my Motion Training DVD

Check out my Vimeo page

[Syed Sharif abdul]

Hi Dale,

I prefer to work in original composition. When the composition become bigger/complicated, you can just PreCompose it. The disadvantage of render and continue on the next comp are :

i. Harder to trace your workflow after few round or days/month.

ii. Might have quality drop issue if mov is render in lower video format setting and you continue to render it again and again.

iii. Don’t have option for scalling without losing the quality especially for gfx element created using illustrator/AE.

Just my opinion.. 🙂

Regards,
AESheriff
https://aftereffectbasic.blogspot.com/

[Dale Kutzera]

Thanks. Precomposing will work in some cases, but there are other cases where I just want to clean up all the layers in the timeline (yet still preserve the ability to go in and manipulate them). I am creating comps with several animated characters and each character has several parts. In the project file I can keep track of things by putting all elements of a character into one folder, but I don’t see “create new folder” as an option in the timeline. Any thoughts?

[Dale Kutzera]

So I Googled around some more and found that “folders in timeline” is a common idea, but it could make rendering more complex. Perhaps CS6 has solved this. I may try some old parenting and shy-ing to keep things a bit cleaner.