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Repeating clips.
Hi.
I’m finding working with loops in AE particually difficult, also the way in wich AE handles composition data/ clip blocks on the timeline is really counter intuative to me, AE presents our compositions in a way thats very confusing and unclear, or so it seems.
The way that loops and repeating clips are approached in AE is pretty impractical as far as I can work out, you have to copy and “Place” each and every clip that you want to repeat in to it’s respective place manually for a start when a simple “Repeat” option would have been much better – Right click select repeat, type in number of times to repeat, Done!! no copy paste/drag drop and place is necisarry at all, say you have to reapeat a clip 50 times, that could take half an hour in AE!!
The other problem is that AE puts each repeated clip on to it’s own time line, when there’s really no need for it too. A simple loop should not need to take up the whole screen, working like this is impossible, you can’t see any of your other parts in your composition or where your loop in/out point’s are.
I know there are workarounds (though I don’t know them that well) I know they involve hiding layers etc but is simply removing data from the timeline really the best sollution?
There are a lot of other apps that present composition data and work with timelines far better.
A simple repeated clip in AE (takes up the whole composition window)
Many many repeated clips (loops) in a different app, far far more clips than than above, presented well giving you a clear overview of your composition.
Do you guy’s get what I’m saying, I know this is mostly relevent to people working with AV/dance music visuals as these are created mostly using loops and it’s no neccisarrily relavnt to everyone, but if any of you can help me improve my workflow in this area (Speciffically with loops) I’d bevery greatfull.
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4 Replies
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Hey Richie,
There’s two ways around this, one is an expression you can add to the clip that will make it loop as long as you want (Tutorial link below).
The other is, after you duplicate all those clips you have shown in your pic, you could select them all, click layer, Pre-compose, and Precompose all of them into one named clip. Then drag that clip into your project instead of all of them in your project.
Hope that helps.
Loop Tutorial Link: https://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping.php
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Perhaps I don’t understand your issue. It appears that you’ve made this more complex than it needs to be, You can set the number of loops in the interpret footage dialog. If you’ve got a 3 second clip you need to loop, right click it in the project panel and set the number of times you want it to loop.
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if you’re talking about quicktime or movie clips (not compositions), yes you can loop this. select the clip in the project window and right-click to bring up interpret footage. on the bottom is the loop function, set it to as high as you like.
if you want to loop a composition, you can time remap it and put a loop out expression (you may have to google adding expressions or search the cow for further instructions).
you can also render that composition and import it back to your project, then interpret footage again (ctrl or command F) to loop it as many times as you want.
as far as duplicating and arranging clips to loop (aka, the hard way), it also shouldn’t take long. duplicate the clip a couple of times (using the shortcut ctrl or command D), select all, duplicate again (which basically multiplies your duplicate by the number of selected layers), then select all, right-click on a layer, select keyframe assistant-sequence layers, don’t check anything, and AE will arrange your layers for you. shouldn’t take 2 minutes.
hope this helps.
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Oh guy’s thanks, I had no idea 😀
This is going to make my job a lot easier, I should have learned not to underestimate AE by now, but I always do, I feel like such an arse lol.
Cheers, going to try out all your sugestions now.
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