[Stephen Barrante]

Hi Derek – I’ve been trying to locate the same solution for AE. I’ve been working in Timeline based applications for some time, and over the past 10 years it has largely been in Flash. Flash has a very nice “Insert Frame” command, and I used it ALL the time to simply shift everything out, using the Timeline marker as a starting point. Have yet to find something that is similar to this in AE, and it’s driving me nuts.

I’ve had to re-think the way I build compositions, and watching some of the more complicated tutorials out there, it looks like people make their comps and layers span the entire length of the clip. So in the vent you need to shift things out or back, you just select all the layers, press “U”, select all your keyframes and drag them out. This works fine, as long as you don’t have complicated animations in the compositions. Since composition timelines mirror the main timeline (assuming they share a common starting point), you will have to update those as well. That can become a mini nightmare, just because the client wanted some text 10 seconds in, to stay on the screen longer.

I’ve also been scouring the Web for Scripts or Extensions that might do this as well. If I find anything – you’ll all be the first to know.

Cheers,
Stephen

[Stephen Barrante]

Not only do I need the same solution, but my comp looks the same as yours! Have the motion path, but all the arrows are emitting along the path, pointing to the right, instead of the direction of the motion path.

I seem to keep hitting dead-ends. Auto-orient (which I actually haven’t tried) I speculate will rotate the Particular layer (layer with the Effect). This would be bad, since the 3D space is really an illusion applied to a 2D plane, ie the layer. I thought maybe if I rotated the emitter so it was sideways, the particles would fly out side ways… but so far the X,Y,Z rotation does squat.

Let’s put our heads together on this, I’m sure there is a solution!

Steve