point control changing a precomp can’t be keyframed?

[Darby Edelen]

[Bert Brown] “i’m trying to use point control outside of a precomp to control the position of the picture inside the comp. it works fine until i keyframe it, then i lose control.

is there a way to fix this? i hate having to keep switching back and forth and making sure the timing is correct, etc etc “

Where do you have the point control applied in the parent composition? My guess is that it’s an issue of AE’s render order, but I can’t be sure that there’s a way around it.

Have you tried moving the layer that has the point control applied above the pre-comp in the layer stack that it’s trying to affect?

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Bert Brown]

thanks for responding. i have actually tried both having the point control on the precomp itself and a separate null, which was above the lyaer.

i’ll try some variations, but is there any other way one might control what’s inside a comp from outside of it?

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[Dan Ebberts]

I think you just need have your slave layer’s position expression do a layer space transform to get the point control from the null’s layer space into world space, like this:

L = comp(“main”).layer(“control”);
L.toWorld(L.effect(“Point Control”)(“Point”))

where “main” is the parent comp and “control” is the null layer. If your comps are different sizes, or you have repositioned the child comp within the parent, the expression gets a little more complicated, but it’s still doable.

Dan