[Walter Soyka]

Maybe check out the Essential Graphics workflow? This will let you build a comp in After Effects that exposes parameters that can be changed in Premiere (or in After Effects). That means you can use the one comp over and over, passing it different parameters, with the ability to push changes up-stream and/or down-stream.

Here’s some reading on the topic:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/user-guide.html/after-effects/using/creating-motion-graphics-templates.ug.html

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/essential-graphics-panel

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/master-properties-after-effects/

[Walter Soyka]

Apply this expression to your orientation property, and say thanks to Dan Ebberts:

try{
L = thisComp.activeCamera;
u = fromWorldVec(L.toWorldVec([1,0,0]));
v = fromWorldVec(L.toWorldVec([0,1,0]));
w = normalize(fromWorldVec(L.toWorldVec([0,0,1])));
sinb = clamp(w[0],-1,1);
b = Math.asin(sinb);
cosb = Math.cos(b);
if (Math.abs(cosb) > .0005){
c = -Math.atan2(v[0],u[0]);
a = -Math.atan2(w[1],w[2]);
}else{
a = (sinb < 0 ? -1 : 1)*Math.atan2(u[1],v[1]);
c = 0;
}
[radiansToDegrees(a),radiansToDegrees(b),radiansToDegrees(c)]
}catch(err){
value
}

[Walter Soyka]

No, you can’t do a dynamic link from one AEP to another.

You can import one AEP into another, but it creates a copy instead of a reference within the new project. You could change the original and the changes would not sync to your imported project.

Can you describe what you’re trying to accomplish? Maybe there’s another workflow we could suggest.

[Walter Soyka]

Yes, that will only get you the width. If you’re putting this in a rectangle size property, or in a scale property, you will also need to calculate the height and pass both dimensions.

Without seeing exactly what you’re doing, I can only give hints.

[Walter Soyka]

The Math.max() function returns the largest value from the arguments you pass to it, so we can set the width of both boxes to the larger of the two widths.

The expression will look something like this:

Math.max(thisComp.layer("Title 1").sourceRectAtTime(time).width, thisComp.layer("Title 2").sourceRectAtTime(time).width);

[Walter Soyka]

It depends on the display and the player. You’ll have to get these specs from the technical team producing the display system.

[Walter Soyka]

The switch is called “collapse transformations” when you use it on a composition layer, and it works a bit differently than “continuously rasterize” on a vector layer — which is very confusing, because of course it’s the same switch 🙂

Enabling that switch actually changes the render order in After Effects, and for a comp layer, it treats every layer within the comp as if they were layers directly in the containing comp.

There’s a really good article and tutorial on this here:
https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/collapse-transformations-continuously-rasterize-after-effects

The bottom line, unfortunately, is that one cannot simply click “collapse transformations” and get a sharper version of the precomp. There are a lot of things (effects & masks especially) which will behave and render very differently than you might expect.

(But none of that should cause Ae to fail to preview or render your frame…)

[Walter Soyka]

I’m not seeing the differences that you are — both images look the same to me (although the clips themselves seem to be slightly different timing / camera position).

Can you post some screenshots showing your complete UI so we can see what you’re seeing?

[Walter Soyka]

Control+click (PC) or Command+click (macOS) the timecode display on the timeline viewer to cycle through different time display styles. You can also change the time display style in the project settings dialog.

[Walter Soyka]

Lighting! One common feature in all the shots you posted above is some kind of backlight (also known as a rim light or a kicker). If you’re not familiar with film-style / 3-point lighting, I’d suggest starting there. It’ll give you a lot more to work with once you move into the grading and optics effects mentioned above.