Creating a simple loop

[Mike Derk]

Man thank you for sticking it out with me. My problem was that I was dragging the keyframe, not the outpoint for the nested comp, so yes, the layer was disappearing before it had a chance to loop. I solved it a different way, but I’m glad to know this way — I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around how this program “thinks”.

I believed (without even knowing it) that if I dragged the nested composition out from 3 seconds to 20 seconds that I would be forcing it into slo-mo, playing at 3/20th the normal speed. Why would I think that? Who knows!

[Darby Edelen]

[mikederk] “I believed (without even knowing it) that if I dragged the nested composition out from 3 seconds to 20 seconds that I would be forcing it into slo-mo, playing at 3/20th the normal speed.”

If your nested comp is 3;00 long then that happens when you drag the 3;00 keyframe farther along the timeline. If you drag it to 20;00 then it will play at 3/20th its normal frame rate.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Mike Derk]

I think the notion of what I was keyframing, or rather how the keyframes were mapping onto the original time, was lost on me. It’s not that it’s more abstract that the X and Y dimensions, it’s just that it’s not as easy to visualize (for me). I was surprised that the grapher didn’t show the loop (as a series of angled lines)… it does it all under the hood, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m halfway up that learning curve, and moving onto another one…