After Effects

This was a while back, but I thought I should write about it. You know how I said I thought After Effects was a waste of time (not really)? Well I still do (not really), except a little less now. This is probably obvious to most people, but me being a relative AE noob, I thought it was real nifty when Susan showed me how to use pre-comps!

I love pre-comps!

They're this thing where instead of having one composition where you just Shove Everything In, you have a composition referencing multiple compositions referencing multiple compositions etc. in a tree-like structure. Things start looking half organised even.

You go from something like this:

To something like this:

Notice the size of the scroll bar. Anyway, so what could happen is that I have a pre-comp for each shot, and pre-comps in that composition for each layer and pre-comps in that one for outlines and colours and time out all the frames for a single shot in single composition. As I said, a huge obvious major AE feature that I managed to miss, but still, I'm learning! :D

After Effects still not amazingly convenient for me though, because I my computer isn't tank enough for reasonably fast previews, and file management is annoying as always.