[Walter Soyka]

[George Henderson] “Usually, I would duplicate ‘Comp A’ into two parts (‘Comp A – Text’ & ‘Comp A – Logo’) and drop the two into ‘Comp B’. Looking forward to your response, thanks!”

That’s the way I would handle it, too, but starting with Ae CC v15.1, you do have a new option: Master Properties.

Master Properties is a new feature that lets you control specific properties of a comp when it’s nested in another comp. I think of it like instancing a comp, with a few tweakable parameters. Here’s the basic workflow:

1. With the Essential Graphics panel, identify the properties in the master comp that you’d like to be able to change from within other comps.

2. Use the master comp as a layer in other containing comps. Twirl open its layer properties, and adjust/keyframe the master properties you made available in the first step. Each comp layer will render an instance of the master comp, with the adjustments you’ve made in the timeline.

Here’s a quick intro to Master Properties:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjAW70_kePI

Here’s the documentation:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-motion-graphics-templates.html#main-pars_header_1586269523

Here’s a screengrab from a setup I’ve done based on your comp. (It uses checkboxes to control layer visibility in the master comp. Note that they exist only in Comp A, and can be freely and independently manipulated in Comp B):

And here’s the AEP:
12664_layerdisplaymasterproperties.aep.zip

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

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[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Bentley] “I wasn’t able to load the AE project for some reason (different version perhaps). But the usual gotcha for most people is that you have to interpret the UV pass element in the project panel and go to the Color Management tab and choose preserve RGB.”

I opened the project, and this is exactly the problem.

The color management engine attempts to preserve the appearance of color across spaces by transforming the color values from the source space to the working space. But UV material passes contain data, not image; it’s not the appearance of color, but rather the literal values that we need. “Preserve RGB” tells the color management engine to keep the values (even though the colors will not “look” wrong). Bad for an image pass, but critical for a data pass.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

I imagine you had a folder in the list?

This version should be more robust and yield a little more information. I’ve also fixed a bug where the last item in the list wasn’t displayed.

// quick script to yield tab-separated name, type, width, height, frame rate, and duration for every item in a project

{
var projectTimeDisplayType = app.project.timeDisplayType;
app.project.timeDisplayType = TimeDisplayType.TIMECODE;
var namesAndFrameSizes = "Name\tType\tWidth\tHeight\tFrame Rate\tDuration\n";

for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i++) {
var asset = new Object;
asset.name = app.project.item(i).name;
asset.typeName = app.project.item(i).typeName;
asset.width = (isNaN(parseInt(app.project.item(i).width))) ? "-" : parseInt(app.project.item(i).width);
asset.height = (isNaN(parseInt(app.project.item(i).height))) ? "-" : parseInt(app.project.item(i).height);
asset.frameRate = (isNaN(parseFloat(app.project.item(i).frameDuration))) ? "-" : parseFloat(1/app.project.item(i).frameDuration).toFixed(2);
asset.durationTimeCode = (isNaN(asset.frameRate)) ? "-" : timeToCurrentFormat(app.project.item(i).duration, asset.frameRate, true);
namesAndFrameSizes += asset.name + "\t" + asset.typeName + "\t" + asset.width + "\t" + asset.height + "\t" + asset.frameRate + "\t" +asset.durationTimeCode + "\n";
}
app.project.timeDisplayType = projectTimeDisplayType;
alertScroll("Names and Frame Sizes", namesAndFrameSizes);
}

function alertScroll (title, input) // string, string/array
{
// if input is an array, convert it to a string
if (input instanceof Array)
input = input.join("\r");
var w = new Window("dialog", title);
var list = w.add("edittext", undefined, input, {multiline: true, scrolling: true});
// the list should not be bigger than the maximum possible height of the window
list.maximumSize.height = w.maximumSize.height - 100;
list.minimumSize.width = 600;
w.add("button", undefined, "Close", {name: "ok"});
w.show();
}

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Bentley] “That’s not to say AE does that pruning well. (has it ever?)”

There are occasional cache-related bugs (like the “After Effect Composition background glitch?” thread from a couple days back), but I have never seen a version of Ae fail to remove its own old cache files to make room for new ones.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Ae automatically prunes older items out of the cache. You might get that error message, though, if your other caches are taking up too much space. Note that each version of Ae creates its own cache, so if you’ve upgraded, you might have an old cache taking up space.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

This version adds frame rate and duration:

// quick script to yield names and frame sizes, frame rates, and durations for every item in a project

{
var projectTimeDisplayType = app.project.timeDisplayType;
app.project.timeDisplayType = TimeDisplayType.TIMECODE;
var namesAndFrameSizes = "Name\tWidth\tHeight\tFrame Rate\tDuration\n";

for (var i = 1; i < app.project.numItems; i++) {
var asset = app.project.item(i);
var frameRate = parseFloat(1/asset.frameDuration).toFixed(2);
namesAndFrameSizes += asset.name + "\t" + asset.width + "\t" + asset.height + "\t" +
frameRate + "\t" +timeToCurrentFormat(asset.duration, frameRate, true) + "\n";
}
app.project.timeDisplayType = projectTimeDisplayType;
alertScroll("Names and Frame Sizes", namesAndFrameSizes);
}

function alertScroll (title, input) // string, string/array
{
// if input is an array, convert it to a string
if (input instanceof Array)
input = input.join("\r");
var w = new Window("dialog", title);
var list = w.add("edittext", undefined, input, {multiline: true, scrolling: true});
// the list should not be bigger than the maximum possible height of the window
list.maximumSize.height = w.maximumSize.height - 100;
list.minimumSize.width = 600;
w.add("button", undefined, "Close", {name: "ok"});
w.show();
}

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

If you use File > Save as > Save a copy as XML, you’ll be able to use standard text tools to search and replace file names in the resulting AEPX file.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

View > Clear Guides

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Here’s a quick and dirty script that will present the name, width and height of every item in an After Effects project in a dialog box with editable text (which you can copy and paste directly into Excel). It does no error checking, so if you have items without width and height, it will fail with an error.

Save this snippet with a text editor as a .jsx file and run it from Ae.

// quick script to yield names and frame sizes for every item in a project

{
var namesAndFrameSizes = "";

for (var i = 1; i < app.project.numItems; i++) {
namesAndFrameSizes += app.project.item(i).name + "\t" + app.project.item(i).width + "\t" + app.project.item(i).height + "\n";
}

alertScroll("Names and Frame Sizes", namesAndFrameSizes);
}

function alertScroll (title, input) // string, string/array
{
// if input is an array, convert it to a string
if (input instanceof Array)
input = input.join("\r");
var w = new Window("dialog", title);
var list = w.add("edittext", undefined, input, {multiline: true, scrolling: true});
// the list should not be bigger than the maximum possible height of the window
list.maximumSize.height = w.maximumSize.height - 100;
list.minimumSize.width = 600;
w.add("button", undefined, "Close", {name: "ok"});
w.show();
}

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

This does really depend on the shot, but I think Flame’s Motion Warp Tracking or NUKE’s Smart Vectors fits this kind of work more naturally than the Ae toolset does.

Tracking the sweat with Mocha and replacing it with painted patches might be worth trying in Ae, as would a dedicated plugin like Beauty Box.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]