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Julio Dojo
Julio Dojo
Participating Frequently
January 14, 2022
Open for Voting

AE: Group Layers without Pre-Composing

  • January 14, 2022
  • 11 replies
  • 8611 views

Dear Community,

Dear After Effects Team @Adobe

 

Why is there still no way to group layers without pre-composing within a single composition?

I imagine it to function just like groups in Photoshop, where you expand a group to reveal all layers within. This will open up entirely new workflows.

 

I came across a plugin created by Petter Bergmar called "FoldLayers": https://vimeo.com/121569449

Is it really this complicated to natively implement such a functionality into After Effects?

 

Can wait to receive aducated reponses.

Kind regards

    11 replies

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    Paul Tuersley
    Inspiring
    January 14, 2022

    GM FoldLayers looks pretty neat.

     

    When I've seen this discussed it's been that people effectively want to be able to 'twirl open' a precomp and see it's layers visible in the current comp. This is very different from FoldLayers (which just appears to use AE's Shy Layers system to show/hide layers) in that you'd be able to affect the group of layers by altering that main layer (i.e. the way a precomp becomes a single layer in the current comp). But there are potential  issues with this, notably that you could keyframe a Time Remap onto that comp layer to change the timings of the contents, so if you were to twirl open that precomp the keyframes in it wouldn't be at times that represented the remapping occuring on the 'group layer' which would make for some potentially unintuitive editing behaviour.

     

    I can't say for sure but I perhaps the reason we haven't seen it is because there's this expectation for what it would need to be able to do that would be considerably more complex to implement. Why do it in this more basic way when third-parties are already perfectly able to implement it themselves?

    Julio Dojo
    Julio DojoAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    January 24, 2022

    Hello Paul,

     

    thank you for taking the time and repyling. Much appreciated!

    I see the potential issues that you are refereing to. However Adobe could make it functional in this way, that it had some limitations, when for example trying to time remap the grouped layer, this then simple wouldn't be possible. So If you tried to time remap you'd have to precomp. 

     

    I am thinking of warp stabilizier in PR for example. If you are trying to change speed/duration of any clip in PR with warp stabilizier applied, Premiere simply tells you, that this isn't possible, thereby forcing you to first nest your clip and then apply the speed/duration effect...and people have found there ways to work in this sort of fashion. So why not make it similarly workable in AE.

     

    Unfortunately the Plugin GM FoldLayers has been discontinued from development and won't work in the newer version of AE. So at this moment in time, there isn't really any alternative.

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