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Creating “groups” in After Effects
I am new to After Effects and I use Apple’s Motion alot.
In Motion you can create groups and add components in the group so you can later apply motion paths and behaviors to the group which will affect all of the components inside that group.
How can you do this in After Effects?
I want to be able to change the scale of three different things at the same time.
Thanks!
Jose M.
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4 Replies
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in ae you can create pre-comps to group layer into a single nested comp. that nested comp is then treated as a single layer. to do this, select the layer you want to ‘group’ and choose layers>pre-compose…
you can also use parenting to loosely group layers together. for something like scaling a few layers together, parenting can work pretty well. i would add a null layer (layer>new>null) and give it a name that makes sense, like ‘scale parent’ or something. then select the layer you want to parent to the scale null and use the parenting pickwhip in the timeline to direct them to the null layer (if you don’t see the parenting panel, then use the menu at the upper-right corner of the timeline and choose columns>parenting).
now, as you scale (or re-position, rotate, etc) the null, the layers that are parented to it will do the same as if they were a single piece. each individual layer is still independent, so you can select an individual layer and adjust it’s properties and not affect the others in the parenting group.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks!
The parenting technique worked well!
Thanks so much Kevin!!
Jose M.
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As usual, Kevin’s information is spot-on. I’ll follow by giving you some links to pages with some more information about precompositions and parenting.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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Greatly appreciated, thanks, really helpful.
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