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Pre Comp Current Time Indicator in Wrong Place Causes Issues with Parent comps

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 24, 2021
5 replies
3085 views

Hello,

I am not sure if I accidentally clicked or pressed something because I am relatively new to After Effects, but I have a main composition and a couple of nested pre comps that I made. I am animating things in these nested pre comps that is only supposed to run for a couple of seconds. For some reason, the current time indicator decided to position itself at 03:25:00 as shown in the attached screenshot by default. The animation is already supposed to be over at that point, so if I navigate back to the parent comp, when I start playing from the start, that nested pre comp will just be static. If I click back into that nested pre comp, I will find that the current time indicator has moved back to 03:25:00.

To clarify, if I move this current time indicator back to the start, I am able to play my animation fine. I can leave it at 0:00:00, but if I click back to the parent comp I actually end up seeing a blank space in the preview and my current time indicator is gone until I manually click on the timeline to bring it back. And now, if I click back into the pre comp I will find that the current time indicator is at 03:25:00 which is not where I originally left it. This is happening to another of my nested pre comps within the parent comp as well. I have tried relaunching AE as well, but I think one of my settings might be amiss somehow? Everything was working before and I only noticed this issue after doing an Adobe Media Encoder export because the exported result had static animations in it which was not supposed to happen.

Error or problem

Correct answer Mylenium

Your timecodes are negative, which hints at a major screw-up like having stretched time in the minus ranges or somehow unwittingly trimmed a comp oddly. It's no wonder then that it always jumps back because that likely is the actual zero comp start point of the parent comp. Start by checking your composition settings comp start time and shift the layers into positive time ranges.

Mylenium

A

abid_7228

Participant

After so much time waste, I was finally able to find the problem, These both compositions are 10 sec but the selected one ends at 4:11. I was curios to find the reason for this difference when Stretch option captured my attention and when i changed it to 100% my problem was fixed, You also check every composition and see if any layer is stretched to a different value than 100.

R

Renato Dstteffano

Participant

Hi, you can adjust this in Composition > Composition Setting > Start timecode and set in 0:00:00:00

MyleniumCorrect answer

Legend

Your timecodes are negative, which hints at a major screw-up like having stretched time in the minus ranges or somehow unwittingly trimmed a comp oddly. It's no wonder then that it always jumps back because that likely is the actual zero comp start point of the parent comp. Start by checking your composition settings comp start time and shift the layers into positive time ranges.

Mylenium

LuffytaroOfficialAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for the suggestion, I ended up going to check my comp start time like you mentioned, and they were all starting from 0:00:00. But I trimmed the end time of all of them to the needed length of 13 seconds, and after I did that, the timeline item/bar - whatever its called (mine was light brown) - for the Nails comp in the parent completely disappeared. So I just went and dragged and dropped the Nails comp from the project files because it was still saved there, and now I can see everything and the times for everything are now synced properly again.

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

Here's what I know. You have 7 layers in a timeline that is more than three minutes and thirty seconds long, and the layers are all stacked up on top of each other for the entire duration of the comp.

Here's what I can guess from your description: There is an option in Preferences/General to Syncronize Time of All Related Events. Make sure that is turned on.

One more note: * The "Drag & Drop here..." area is buggy and should not be used to share images. Please use the toolbar or just drag your images to the reply field. You can even copy an image file and paste it to the reply field on the forum.

LuffytaroOfficialAuthor

Known Participant

It's already on in my Preferences. I attached another screenshot here in case there is anything else in my General Preferences menu that might be off. My project isn't too big or complicated, so I am wondering if it would be worth it to just create a new project and copy paste the layers and compositions there and see how things turn out?

Mylenium

Legend

Could be anything from using time-remapping to using a specific expression somewhere that retrieves a value from that time. That and of course a million other things like framerate mismatches, different composition start times being set, the source timecode being used differently and whatnot. No offens, but you've written a lot, but not really provided any real info and as @Rick Gerard would say, cropped screenshots don't tell us much, anyway. So with all respect, you need o do better and give us at least screenshots of both comps without critical info like layer switches and revealed properties/ expressions being clipped away and as much info on what exactly you are doing with the pre-comp layer in question.

Mylenium

LuffytaroOfficialAuthor

Known Participant

Ok hopefully this captures much more, but all the layers in "Nails" are almost all the same so I opened up a menu for the top one. You can see that the current time indicator is 03:25:00. I also want to note that I do not think I used any expressions or custom expressions that I know of in my project. After I move the current time indicator back to 0:00:00 and switch back to the parent comp, image B is what I see. Let me know if there is more information that I can expand somewhere that you need to see.

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