Linking expressions across comps

[Darby Edelen]

[Peter Hickson] “I have been able to link the two layers, but the expression changes the values of my linked layer rather than moving them relative to the master layer.”

comp("CompName").layer("LayerName").position will give you the position of the layer named ‘LayerName’ in the composition ‘CompName.’ However, I’m a little concerned that your question might be more complicated than that…

The position value returned will be the position of ‘LayerName’ inside of ‘CompName,’ so if you’re using one of these (or both) as pre-comps inside another composition and trying to get position values for the layer in the ‘CompName’ relative to the composition it’s appearing in then it gets a little more complicated:

thisComp.layer("CompName").toComp(comp("CompName").layer("LayerName").position);

…should do it!

[Peter Hickson]

I really should have explained it a bit better. I have three comps that make one image across 3 screens. I was trying to link the base layers of the outside screens to the base layer of the centre screen so that as the centre screen panned up the outer screens would follow. I managed to get it to work by adding an offset to the end of the expression, but I was wondering if there was a slightly more elegant way of doing it without having to do the basic maths.

the expression that i used was:
comp name.(“layer name”).transform.position-[xoffset,yoffset]

cheers
peter

[Filip Vandueren]

Usually this is done by animating everything in a superwide comp,
then cropping when rendering 3 versions.