[Andy Engelkemier]

This is still pretty bad. Sometimes the spacebar just Won’t stop the playback.
Switching to Length instead of Framerate seems to fix it though.

I feel like this is related also, so I’ll add it. If you don’t make any changes, you pause/stop, then hit space again to play….shouldn’t the audio already be mixed? If you have audio it says “mixing audio for preview” Every time for a second before starting. But if no changes were made to Anything, then that should already be taken care of. I would understand it might be more difficult if you change something like overall length, or move some items around. But if you didn’t touch the audio, the preview should still be fine. And if you touched Nothing? I’m sure it’s harder than it seems, but that one Seems easy. You haven’t changed anything, use the exact same preview. It should be created already.

If that’s a performance setting for some reason, how do I get it back? I don’t remember it working like that before. Once I created a ram preview of any sort, I could play, scrub, pause, play all I wanted without anything happening, unless I changed something.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I’m also looking for this. I have to do a DVD, yes, you read that right. So I’m putting an mp4 on the dvd as well so people can view the file as it’s meant to be. Of course, they can’t skip to sections of the video very easily without chapters. I’d love to just put a few markers in there so people could skip.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Ha, I always focus too much on animation footage. There is rarely a time when you would be able to “extend” footage there. That would just mean you wasted a lot of time rendering. But you’re right. extending footage could be an option.

I think it’s definitely best to have an option box come up with a few different ways to treat selected items. In case your footage is timed only before, extend is probably the best option. If it’s not timed and you don’t have enough of it, you may need to add a time remap and live with less frames. Or you may just want it to add a marker and leave the footage alone otherwise. I’d like that marker to be named with the amount of time/frames things were extended.

Regarding precomps: Many times I’ll precomp something that doesn’t animate. But that Has to have time. Unless AfterEffects added a way to say a precomp is a still image, I usually just keep the time it gives me, create a time remap, then delete the second key. Sure, I could render out to a photoshop file or other still format, but then it’s no longer live linked to all the footage items which may not be complete.

If your precomp has timed animation, you’re likely going to have a bad time including it. Although, in my case for this project (which is finished now) I did have some precomps with some animation. But the timing for that was done with time remap. The animation was done in the precomp with no pauses. The pauses needed were then added using time remap. I do this often for 3d rendered footage. You don’t render pauses from there. So you make whatever edits you need in one comp, and then use that precomp in your new composition. I leave markers in the precomp, which come over when I insert it in (if not, there are scripts for that). I add a time remap, then insert keyframes at, and immediately after markers. Then I switch the keyframe on the markers to hold frames. This way I can insert my pauses easily, without having to split up my footage into new lines. I try and keep it under 50 layers per composition when possible, mostly just so it fits on screen. And precomping just makes expression more complicated.

I think one big challenge is that it’s most convenient to do all your layers at once. But you may have to treat them differently. You may not be able to just say, do this for all precomps, do this for all footage, etc. You almost want to select what layers are treated how. I’m not sure how that works with scripts though. That’s most likely more rare than not though, so you could just use the shy layer trick you mentioned. Do some of them, and could even have the script switch them to shy. Then do the others.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I agree that with footage, this would become difficult, knowing what to do. But it wouldn’t even make sense to do this to footage that didn’t have time remap applied, so that would be solved with that wouldn’t it? The same goes for precomps. If something is non-animating as a precomp, that’s fine. It could just have time remap applied without causing a problem.
For the first draft of the script, you could just leave it up to the user to make sure they are selecting the correct layer types. Maybe just give one warning first. Or simply leave a marker, with a label of how much time it should be, on any failed layer at that time so the user knows that they’ll need to manually add some time on that layer however they choose.

I would just say that if you have footage in your selection for the script, then a time remap automatically gets applied, and you’ll end up with a pause in the footage.

But I’ll be using your method here Walter. Thanks for listing that out. I didn’t know I could hold alt to nudge keyframes. I would have moved the CTI to one that snapped well, added my 3 seconds, then snapped to that.

And Dave, I don’t really appreciate the tone of your reply. Your assumptions are over the top, and listing them out in such a way is not helpful to anyone. It seems you are jumping to the conclusion that I want magic. It’s not an impossible script at all, and not all script NEED to work in all situations. That just makes them better. In the situation where I know what I have, and all I’m looking for is that, I could run it. Get all in points after time, get all out points after time, get all keyframes after time, move all these variables a set amount of time. Done.
These are all things that I would be inputting. So is it really magically understanding what I want?
There’s no copying and pasting. I wasn’t even following what you were saying. How would copying and pasting add time? Wouldn’t that just give me double footage, and increase the already towering number of layers?
What I’m looking for is pretty much the rd_Shifter script, but have it only move half of a layer after the CTI instead of the whole thing.

[Andy Engelkemier]

That sure seems like a lot of steps for something that Could be so simple.
But thank you for the tip. I will definitely be using more carefully chosen words and bins in the future. I was hoping I could just use words like keywords, and just type it and go. But I guess you have to do more of a 4 step process to find something. :/

[Andy Engelkemier]

It would be really nice to be able to define each item in a title, kind of like CSS (actually it would be fine by me if it could just reference a CSS file) so that you can change everything all in one swoop later. I set it up as H1, so if I change font, color, size, etc in H1, then anything with H1 gets changed. This would be amazing if You could use the same kind of formatting in all the Adobe software as well. That way, if I’m working in Illustrator as well and change some settings there, it would also update my After Effects sequence, my premiere title, and my photoshop image all at once.
Some genius wanted Comic Sans for their titles? AHHHHH, but I talked them into Avenir instead. Good for me.

Thanks for the tips. I’m learning Premiere and it makes me so angry how many bits of it are so poorly designed. It seems like every time I look for something that seems like it should be easy to do, I find out you can’t do it.
I was actually looking to see how to change the default time for titles (mine are already created) and I learned you can’t. Although, I found a workaround, but it sucks. Open title, create title from title (after you’ve changed the time in preferences) and use that new one instead. Well THAT’s terrible.

I was also hoping you could select multiple objects and just use rate stretch on them, but that only rate stretches the last item in your selection instead of doing what you’d expect and stretching them all as one selection. I wasn’t too hopeful with that one though because AE doesn’t do that either. :/

[Andy Engelkemier]

So I figured out the majority of the problem.

1. if it won’t rate stretch, which seems to happen often enough, just change something about the clip like turn the effect on/off. Maybe click on another one, then come back. This has worked every single time other than clips with transitions on them.

2. transitions. By default, you’d think you can’t change the rate of those clips. But wait, there’s more! You literally have to put your mouse in the Tiny space in the clip between the top or bottom of the clip on the timeline and the effect itself. With that mouse pointer, it’s somewhat difficult to tell where that point on the mouse is, and you get No feedback as to whether or not it’s going to work. But you can just make that row in the timeline taller. (you can hold alt and scrollwheel over any part on the left side of the timeline, which is easier than trying to move the edge manually).

So it seems no part of my workflow is actually causing a problem. It appears that there May be a bug because in most cases, a clip will stretch after simply turning something off then back on again. What it Actually appears to be are a few poor UI choices by Adobe (no big surprise). One example of poor UI choices is just looking at AE, PR, and Audition. They All have timelines, but all 3 have different interactions for moving around the timeline.

[Andy Engelkemier]

How is PR telling me something? What am I missing? My point is, it’s not showing me Anything. It’s just not working.

And the funny thing is, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
example: The clip i was talking about wouldn’t work. I turned off the effect and I could rate stretch. I turned it back on and off a couple times to confirm.
I then went to a different clip for a minute, then came back. It then allowed me to rate stretch With the effect applied and turned on.

So what exactly am I doing wrong in my workflow?

[Andy Engelkemier]

I have the exact same question. Does anyone know of a script that will do this for you?
I already know how to do it manually, but things don’t always snap well (example would be if you have a few layers that end within a couple frames of eachother, or a marker, or keyframe that’s visible) so you’d have to Really pay attention carefully to make sure you line up the correct end without snapping.

[Andy Engelkemier]

That will work. I found a similar solution when searching at home, but it didn’t work. It was doing a similar action in the registry, but the article must have been old because the entry didn’t exist. This looks like exactly what I’m looking for.
At home I was trying to go through old music files and there are tons of duplicates at different qualities and names, so…not Really duplicates. Every time you access a folder it creates thumbs if there was album artwork, then I couldn’t move/delete the folder. Hopefully this will solve that issue as well.

There are a couple other useful tweaks in that policy setting as well. That’s a great find. Thanks.