Timing

The best way for timing out frames for me was in After Effects I found. Originally I was going to do it in Photoshop, but since most of my colouring people didn't use Timeline anyway, and also a host of other issues with After Effects not interpreting the layers right that I can't remember right now, After Effects was the way to go.

The files had to be really clean first however. I separated each shot into two separate files, colour and line. I got rid of any groups, and made sure each layer was on max opacity; it screws with you later otherwise.

Also important was to get rid of any Timeline information remaining on the Photoshop files. I couldn't figure out a nice way to just turn it off so I had to first switch it to Frames and then back to Timeline, so that all the layers would be active at once, then duplicate it to a new file. Frames puts everything on zero opacity though so had to remember to max that.

Or you could just duplicate twice. Whatever floats your boat.

So that way I get clean, consistent layers to work with in After Effects. You know, there is probably a way to clean up stuff in AE anyway, but I couldn't find any, so it was just neater to have everything there on import.

On working in AE, I gotta remember to do this:

• Set durations of pre-comps
• Set pre-comps to 25fps

Plus these amazing shortcuts:

• [ or ]  -->  Move In point or Out point of selected layers to current time
• Alt+[ or Alt+]  -->  Trim In point or Out point of selected layers to current time

Plus if you want to preserve the blending mode effects (like the transparency from Multiply) in a pre-comp, collapse transformations. I don't know why that works, but it do.

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.