[Walter Soyka]

The first control in the Preview panel is for “Keyboard Shortcut.” This allows you to assign a configuration of different preview options (skip, resolution, etc.) to different hotkeys.

Once they’re assigned, you can actually hide the Preview panel entirely and just use those different keystrokes for your different preview options. Maybe Spacebar for normal Ae behavior, NumPad0 for classic RAM preview behavior, Shift+NumPad0 for reduced resolution/frame-skipping, etc.

There are a total of 7 different customizable preview shortcuts. Maybe using these would eliminate your need to change preview settings on the fly?

[Walter Soyka]

I don’t think that there has ever been a way to set a default custom precomp duration. There are a bunch of different situations that will give you different results, but I think they mostly make sense.

Here’s how precomposition duration is determined:

1. If you precompose a single layer and choose “Leave all attributes in comp,” then the duration of the precomp will be the duration of the layer source.
2. If you precompose a single layer and choose “Move all attributes into the new composition” and you do not check “Adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers,” then the duration of the precomp will be the duration of the containing comp.
3. If you precompose a single layer and choose “Move all attributes in the new composition” and you do check “Adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers,” then the duration of the precomp will be the duration of the source layer.
4. When precomposing multiple layers, “Leave all attributes in comp” is not an option; you must use “Move all attributes into the new composition.” In this case, if you check “Adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers,” then the duration will run from the beginning of the earliest selected layer to the end of the latest selected layer.
5. If you precompose multiple layers and you do not check “Adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers,” then the duration of the precomp will be the duration of the containing comp.

Creating new comps (versus precomps) follow different rules:

1. If you’re just creating a new composition and not using the precompose feature, then Ae uses the settings and duration from the last composition you created through the New Composition dialog window. This setting is sticky per-user across projects.
2. If you’re creating a new composition from a single piece of non-time-based footage (i.e., stills), the duration of the comp will be that sticky duration from the last comp you created via the New Composition dialog window.
3. If you’re creating a new composition from a single piece of time-based footage (i.e., movies or audio), the comp duration will match the source footage.
4. If you’re creating a new composition from a set of multiple pieces of footage, whether they are time-based or not, you’ll get a dialog asking if you want to layer them or sequence them, how much overlap, and how long non-time-based footage (i.e., stills) should last in the timeline.

[Walter Soyka]

Corner-pinning is an effect applied to a layer, it is not an intrinsic property of the layer itself. The actual layer’s anchor and position (and thus its transform controls) will not change when you apply a corner-pin effect.

Instead of sending 4 nulls from Maya to Ae to do a 2D corner pin, you could send the Maya camera and 1 null at the center of the plane, then use those to drive the GIF as a 3D layer. Then the object would be set in the scene via its native transform properties.

[Walter Soyka]

There is no way for the render queue pull layer names into file names.

You could write a script to do this, but with only 30 comps, it would be quicker work to do manually.

Next time you approach a project like this, before you make the comps, you can use one of the methods we’ve outlined above to generate the comp names.

[Walter Soyka]

As you’ve mentioned, the built-in After Effects tools for dealing with audio react only to amplitude.

There’s a third-party tool called SoundKeys that responds to frequency ranges as you’re looking for:
https://www.maxon.net/en/red-giant-complete/trapcode-suite/sound-keys

I suppose that you could also build your own by pre-processing the audio in Premiere or Audition with hi and low passes into the frequency bands that you want, then using the built-in amplitude tools on those frequency-banded passes.

[Walter Soyka]

There’s no built-in way to have the render queue reference the name of layers within a comp. I think your best bet is to name the comps as you wish to render. If you’re using a tool like CompsFromSpreadsheets, you can have it rename your comps based on spreadsheet data, then you can use the render queue naming normally.

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry, Christofer, but it doesn’t look like there’s an image in your post.

Without seeing what you’re seeing, I can only suggest a workaround. If you select the layer in the timeline panel and press the P key, you will reveal the position parameters. You can always scrub the Z value there.

[Walter Soyka]

I tend to use UnMult from Red Giant, but you can also use native tools.

Apply the Channel Combiner effect. Set its “From” property to “Max RGB” and its “To” property to “Alpha.” This will take the brightest of the three color channels and use its value for the alpha channel.

Then apply the Remove Color Matting effect (keep the default background color of black). This will eliminate black fringing in partially transparent areas.

[Walter Soyka]

You should file a bug report with Adobe for this, especially if you can reproduce the behavior.

This may be a lot of Saber as Graham says, but it still shouldn’t cause the project to corrupt.

https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

[Walter Soyka]

In Preferences > Display, you can choose from several options for the display of motion paths. In your case, it might best to set “No more than x Keyframes” and use a lower value like 2 or 3.