When you shorten the length of a comp, make it NOT trim the ends of layers to the new comp length!!!

Please could you unlock the Ideas thread and lock this one instead? As I said, I made a mistake and posted it in the wrong forum, and I posted the duplicate (which explains my idea much better) before seeing your reply telling me not to make a duplicate thread 😞 Thanks!

Why would you EVER need this to happen!?!

It causes problems in many cases, eg if you want to time remap and loopOut() a precomp trimmed in this way then you have to go in and manually extend the last frame beyond the end of the precomp, otherwise you get a blank frame in the loop!

Say I have an image layer 10 seconds long. I change the comp to 1 second duration. It trims the layer to 1 second long, rather than just leaving it as a 10 second long layer which extends beyond the end of the 1-second comp duration. I did the same thing with a comp containing a movie file, the movie would simply extend beyond the end of the timeline without being trimmed.

Even more nonsensically, image which - when the comp is shortened - end up completely beyond the end of the timeline get shortened to some weird zero-frames length!?!? Where did I tell AE to simply throw away all info about half my layers's duration just because they are temporarily beyond the end of the comp?

Seems completely absurd that it's always been like this. Removing this behaviour or making it optional in prefs would be a massive improvement.  I can set the duration of an image in various ways and once I do, i'd prefer AE not to chop the end off it, something I can't even think of a use case for.

Please do not create duplicate posts. This one can be moved if needed. So far you haven't really explained what you actually want, just said what you don't like. That's not a constructive way to do feature requests. So perhaps try to explain how you envision this to work in some simple, clear steps.

Mylenium 

The still duration can be set in the preferences. It defaults to the comp duration. Feel free to dial in a fixed value if it better suits your workflow.

Mylenium 

Apologies if I didn't explain myself properly. Say I have an image layer 10 seconds long. I change the comp to 1 second duration. It trims the layer to 1 second long, rather than just leaving it as a 10 second long layer which extends beyond the end of the comp duration, as would happen if I did the same thing with a comp containing a movie file.

Not sure what you're asking here. The comp is your layer. How do you expect this to work otherwise? Unless AE changes its definition of what a composition is and how it behaves at the most basic level this is simply unrealistic. The duration of the comp and the layer resulting from it is an intrinsic property, not a custom attribute. I agree that the time-remapping thing is hard to grasp and understand, but surely the fix can't be changing soem fundamental behavior in AE which would completely change how some things work.

Mylenium