Workflow advice request: Essential Properties in Essential Graphics prohibited

[Walter Soyka]

Your workaround is exactly what I do, too. I think it’s the only way to accomplish what you’re looking to do.

Seems like there’s a bit of a performance penalty for nested Essential Graphics, too, but I still think it’s worth it for all the flexibility that the Essential Graphics workflow brings.

[Andreas Kungl]

Thanks for your swift reply. It is encouraging to realize that I didn’t have a hole in the brain after all.

The workaround we mentioned here is reasonably managable. With one exception, it seems: footage. I would very much like to handle replacable footage through at least two layers of nested pre-comps. But while it is possible to address the footage in the Essential Properties panel of the nested precomp even through scripting (via setAlternativeSource), it seems impossible to hand that reference over to the next level, as there are no “footage controls”.

Could you, as someone with knowledge that dwarves my own by orders of magnitude, confirm that? Or even better: refute?

[Walter Soyka]

I can’t think of a way to handle the indirect footage replacement within the Essential Graphics framework. I guess I’d handle it entirely in scripting.

Remember, though, that you can use Essential Graphics to expose the keyframes and values (in the first level of abstraction) and values only (via expression in the second level of abstraction) from Essential Graphics properties into containing comps, so you could still indirectly manipulate properties of your footage that way.

[Eric Santiago]

Sorry to interrupt but I too have some concerns (same as posted) with EG in AE.

My biggest one is that it’s so easy to delete your created input fields in that panel.

I have done this a few times by accident.
Any way I can lock the input fields?

[Walter Soyka]

Nope, there is no way to lock the contents of the Essential Graphics panel.

No way to have the Essential Graphics panel track the active item comp, either — you have to manually select it from the dropdown.

You know what to do:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects

[Andreas Kungl]

Responding to your previous answer to my original line of thought (I already wrote this once, but Bessie the Spamwatchdog kept me in a corner, circling and growling, growling and circling…):

Thanks again for your confirmation.

I am meditating over your second paragraph, though. See, I have learned all I know about AE (adding to prior experience with other Adobe products and some coding knowledge in general) within the last few months, which means I don’t have much muscle memory concerning workflows that might seem trivial for veterans. Nevertheless, I am confident about finding solutions. But sometimes they are ugly, and I always fear that I am wasting a ton of time just for not knowing of the magic switch.

Therefore, may I humbly ask you to give me a small hint or example to clarify your last paragraph. For instance, I am unsure to which respective levels in my original question your (respective) “levels of abstraction” are referring to. Also “exposing keyframes” is opaque in it’s intended consequence. Do you mean addressing KFs via expressions (which I am familiar with in the sense that I have seen it in the documentation and probably have used it, too)?

I am going to go the script way, like you suggested, for the residue that cannot cleaned up in other ways.

[Andreas Kungl]

Sorry for the double post, but WOW!

I just continued to explore the handing through of Essential Properties and found another devastating setback.

If you place a nested composition (lowest level: L1) in the Essential Graphics Panel of a mid-tier composition (L2) and also add acouple of property sliders that you have prepared on L1 and handed through L2 via the EssentialProperties>(Control)Effects>EssentialGraphicsPanel route, so that you can use all this in a highest composition (L3), then the following occurs:

Everything works as expected (i.e you can manipulate L1 via the EssentialProperties of L2 as displayed in the Layers on L3), UNLESS you swap the L1 composition nested in L2 in the Essential Properties on L3. Then all other controls that relate to the swapped composition break. Even if this comp is identical to the original one (expressions, wiring), except for some changed footage (jpgs) inside.

That doesn’t help. Am I being dumb?

Edit: And just to clarify, it breaks because of the comp replacement as such, not because of the content of the comp. Even if the original L1 comp gets simply duplicated and then slotted in, it breaks the controls. Which totally defies the purpose of the whole instances-shebang, as AE seems to choke on naming/referencing at this point. So comps in the Essential Graphics panel are thus set to strictly as-is, which is mightily disappointing.

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry for my delay, Andreas. All I was trying to say was that with Essential Graphics, the obvious workflow is to expose properties you want to OVERWRITE in a containing comp. However, you can also expose properties that you want to READ in a containing comp.

For example, if you were animating things like position, scale and opacity for a footage layer that you would have normally targeted for replacement with Essential Graphics, you could instead pass those values up through Essential Graphics for reference in containing comps. Then you could choose whether you wanted to handle the footage at L1, L2 or L3 in your setup — but still retain the animation as originally intended.

I also think that you CAN swap EG comps if they have the same kinds of properties in the same order. If you were to over-engineer all your EG comps of the same level so they all had the same properties (whether you used them or not in each specific comp), you should be able to swap them without breaking things.