[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.

[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]

Muhahahaha! So I can start mass-flogging dodgy pseudo-medical products!

No seriously, thanks a lot, also for your mail. I assumed it didn’t get through to you, as I received a mailer error message.

[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?