[Darby Edelen]

Any 2D layers, including adjustment layers and Null objects if the 3D switch isn’t on, that reside in between 3D layers will cause the 3D layers above that 2D layer to render independently of the 3D layers below that layer. This breaks lights, render order and other nice ‘logical’ 3D effects. It can sometimes be used to your advantage though.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Any effects used? Are you using time-remapping or time based effects?

If you can manage to take a screen shot of all the modified properties on your layers (select the layers and press ‘uu’) that would probably be the most helpful thing for us to attempt to determine the problem. Of course, with a lot of layers, this will be a lot of information as there are a lot of variables involved. I’d just hate to have you step through everything you did one by one =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Eric Goldstein] “I’m using footage shot on film at 23.976 transferred to video with pulldown added resulting in 29.97 footage.”

Is there anyway you can contact the people who added the pulldown to find out what pattern they used?

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

You should be able to accomplish the same thing if you create another new composition at 1280 x 720 and put your two footage compositions into this comp, the larger one on the bottom and the smaller on the top.

This would only require one render, but it will likely be about twice as long as either composition rendering separately =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

There are actually animation presets that already exist in AE for this sort of thing. You can use these as a starting point. Try searching for ‘Bad TV’ in your animation presets.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Jurgen_t] “eg 1 layer is 1280 x 720 and another layer is 1000 x 500, so when up scaling the small layer…it still do not exeed its borders – the big background layer makes up a kind of frame”

This needs a little more explanation. It sounds like you’re describing a problem, but in order for us to know what the problem is we need to know what it is you’re trying to do. Do you want a frame around the smaller layer? Do you want the layers to be the same size? Be as specific as possible =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

The only way I can think to do what you want is to use create a unique pre-comp for each final comp. If you name them identically but add “_pre” onto the end of the pre-comp then you can speed your work by using an expression that chops the “_pre” off the end of the pre-comp’s name to access the final comp:


l = thisComp.name.length - 4; //subtract 4 (the length of '_pre') from the length of the thisComp's name
finalName = thisComp.name.substring(0, l); //remove the last 4 letters from the thisComp's name
comp(finalName).layer("Side1-Opacity").effect("Slider Control")("Slider")


Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Brian Stewart] “thisComp.parent.layer(“Side1-Opacity”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)”

Unless I’m mistaken the ‘parent’ method literally returns the parent of the layer in the composition. When you put a pre-composition into a final composition, the final comp is not the parent of the pre-comp. The pre-comp simply exists within the final comp as another layer.

thisComp.parent wouldn’t return anything because a composition cannot have a parent, unless it is used as a layer in another ‘final’ composition. Then only in that ‘final’ composition, where the pre-comp is treated as a layer, can a parent be assigned to the pre-comp.

However, it’s still treated as a layer within the final composition and you would need to use thisLayer.parent instead of thisComp.parent (which would try to find the parent of the ‘final’ comp and fail).

You can consider that a long ‘no way dude’ =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

There’s really not enough information in your post to determine exactly what’s going wrong. Is there a transition between camera layers? Are you using any 3rd party effects (these sometimes forget to update when you make changes, try Edit>Purge>Purge All)? Are you using time-remapping or time based effects? If you trim the offending layer back one frame does it still occur?

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

This expression assumes that you want to know the time between the first and second keyframes, you can change it to be more flexible or just to fit your needs:


t1 = key(1).time;
t2 = key(2).time;
t = t2 - t1;


Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA