[Dale Kutzera]

Thanks. This did the trick. Just have caps-lock on and it boots up fine.

[Dale Kutzera]

the same thing happens to me. Did you ever find a solution?

[Dale Kutzera]

I found a tutorial online that referred to this square as the “Paste-board,” and gave some tips on how to adjust top or side views so all the elements can be seen within it.

[Dale Kutzera]

I recall importing a Sketchup model into AE 5.5.

[Dale Kutzera]

Isn’t this a stop-motion style situation? Google tutorials in animating mouths and you’ll come up with a videos on the subject. Basically, the idea is setting up a comp with mouth phonemes in single frame sequence. Then you tell AE which frame of that layer to play at what point in time on your main comp. Might work for your situation.

[Dale Kutzera]

Thanks. Huge Help!

[Dale Kutzera]

So I Googled around some more and found that “folders in timeline” is a common idea, but it could make rendering more complex. Perhaps CS6 has solved this. I may try some old parenting and shy-ing to keep things a bit cleaner.

[Dale Kutzera]

Thanks. Precomposing will work in some cases, but there are other cases where I just want to clean up all the layers in the timeline (yet still preserve the ability to go in and manipulate them). I am creating comps with several animated characters and each character has several parts. In the project file I can keep track of things by putting all elements of a character into one folder, but I don’t see “create new folder” as an option in the timeline. Any thoughts?

[Dale Kutzera]

Thanks. That might do the trick. I am going for a sort of collage effect, as though the image is made of up fragments that are a bit out of alignment.

[Dale Kutzera]

The plan sounds good, but I’m still perfecting the work flow. It may be to create smaller files I export the individual characters as Prores HQ with a green background, then key out the green when I arrange several characters into a new comp.