[Xav Vonl]

Thanks for your input Dave,

yes that was my question, other than importing one aep within another “the regular way” and then obviously it would not update anymore and it can quickly be a huge mess…..
As for Adobe Team, I haven’t experienced it myself but from the videos I’ve seen online, I’m nowhere neare to being convinced, to say the least…..

[Xav Vonl]

Thank you Brian, almost there, BUT, by doing so the cloned objects get deformed by the spline wrap as well (it works in your scene with sphères but it starts falling apart with cubes for instance), i only want the clones to be distributed along the spline, not deformed according to the it….. or did I miss something ?

[Xav Vonl]

Thank you all for your inputs.

@ Lance : footages are mainly h0264 mov sequences from canon dslr’s and 16bpc TIFF image sequences, no photoshop files in there as I already broke them down to separate TIFF’s to avoid un-necessary layers.

@Walter, thanks for these details, this is how I feared it all worked so the “savin project” readings are a bit misleading as AE is doing more than that….. And I was hoping that there was a means to run through this overhead process only once and then keep on working more smoothly inside the same project once all the instances of AE.exe are launched etc but…no 🙁

So it’s seems like I’m bound to render my collection of 200+ short shots on one single thread, not cool ! Especially as I don’t have enough Vram for opening a secondary AE to keep wotking with the threads I have left while the single one is running…..

[Xav Vonl]

This is where I thought I would find what I am looking for but I’m no expert with these effects and didn’t find the solution in there so far 🙁 but thanks for the hint

[Xav Vonl]

I must have been unclear :

my 5 to 22 minutes render-times are NOT for the whole 5min comp but for a 25 frames-long test-shot in which I have hidden most of the layers just to use it as a quick test.

[Xav Vonl]

Thanks Kevin…. the Preserve Transparency is a feature I had been overlooking so far and I’m sure I’ll use it again from now on…

It took some changes in the approach of the comps but I could use this as a less painful workaround that what I had thought of so far, even if I’m still missing the option to simply mute one layer’s alpha….. this would have been so easy :/

Thanks a lot anyway, now this has revealed another weird issue but I’m opening a new thread for this……

[Xav Vonl]

The stencil alpha trick could have been a workaround in some cases but in my case I think it would not be a suitable solution…. too many layers and comps to deal with…

my foreground is… let’s say a collection of overlapping 3d solids with different blending modes this means I would need to add a “pre-comp level” by pre-rendering my foreground against background and use the stencil alpha of the foreground over the pre-rendered foreground again…. and this in 200+ comps….. headaches 🙂 … while it would be so easy to just be able to tell a layer not to affect alpha….. there must be some way of doing this in AE.

[Xav Vonl]

Alright let’s rewind an start over again.

I have a composition in which I have a layer that I want to see in the RGB but I don’t want this layer to show inthe alpha channel whatsoever.

now the more detailes in case it helps if you wonder why the heck I’d like a layer to not show in the alpha :

1.let’s say I have 3 layers, foreground, middle and background.
all those 3 layers are quite heavy compositions so I wand to pre-render them.

2. the final look of the foreground depends on the background because in my case I use transparency and blending modes

3. so I am pre-rendering the background, pre-rendering the middle comp, but when I want to pre-render the foreground I need to have the background behind it without having it show in the alpha of my output fo pre-rendered foreground….. in NUKE it would be easy or in a 3D software it would be like applying a constant black alpha shader only affectibg ALPHA pass but not the rgb…… but I need to handle this in AE and I can’t find how….. basically I want to mute the alpha of a layer without hiding it from rbg.

Anyone ?

[Xav Vonl]

Thanks for the hint but how am I to use this shape layer then ?
I would have to not use the fill at all , use the shape’s stroke as the “fill” of my line, and then how do I get this stroke stroked again ?

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious as I’m not very used to using those shape layers, sorry…..

[Xav Vonl]

Thanks for your help Darby, sorry for the late reply, I was such in a rush with this project… but this definitely helped 🙂