• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

A problem on After Effects Timeline – help!

Community Beginner ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I am new to After Effects. Editing a lyric video.

I just opened my project file to find that all the red bars (whatever they're called) prior to the ones you see below have vanished. However, the text still remains there. It's as if they're there, but the red blocks aren't showing up. One of the blocks (the highlighted one) is horizontally cut half way. Why?

I am trying to edit the timings of words. Where have my red blocks before these gone? Can someone help?

Screen Shot 2019-03-28 at 18.55.13.png

Views

3.9K

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines

correct answers 1 Correct answer

Community Expert , Mar 31, 2019 Mar 31, 2019

Your first mistake is editing an entire lyric video (dynamic text animation) in a single comp. Handling and editing 1477 layers in a comp that is several minutes long is a nightmare and if you foul something up or need to make a change you are screwed.

I would start breaking up each sentence or phrase into separate comps. You can easily do that by pre-composing a few layers at a time. After you have moved a couple of hundred layers to nested comps your vanished layers may reappear. This should b

...

Votes

Translate

Translate
People's Champ ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

It looks like some sort of graphical glitch. First try emptying your cache.  Then you can try rebooting your machine & finally you make sure you have the latest driver version for your GPU. 

~Gutterfish

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Beginner ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Thanks for the reply. But nope, none of that has fixed the issue.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
People's Champ ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Beginner ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

There are 1477. Most of them single words. It's a lyric video... the song has a lot of lyrics.

Checked that thread you linked. It seems as if my issue is the same as that.

I'm going to need to edit the timing of these layers to fit with each word. What do I do?

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
People's Champ ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

You're just going to have to break it up into more than one composition.

Go to Composition>Composition Settings and rename your comp to "Main Comp" or something like that, then shift-select a bunch of the layers right click and choose "pre-compose".  Give the new comp a name and make sure "Move all attrs..." is ticked.

Repeat this as many times as necessary until your "main comp" is just a few pre-comps layers.  Do all the editing in the pre-comps (you'll have to copy the audio to each new comp as well, obviously) and when it's all done you render the "main comp".

~Gutterfish

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Beginner ,
Mar 31, 2019 Mar 31, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I'll try this out and see if it fixes the issue. Thank you for the reply.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Mar 28, 2019 Mar 28, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

My guess is you've just accidentally shifted some layers, either horizontally (in time) or vertically (Layer order).

Scroll vertically up and down the timeline - are there any active layers anywhere in the timeline?

Very hard to diagnose when you haven't  posted a full frame screen grab of the timeline window.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Mar 31, 2019 Mar 31, 2019

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

LATEST

Your first mistake is editing an entire lyric video (dynamic text animation) in a single comp. Handling and editing 1477 layers in a comp that is several minutes long is a nightmare and if you foul something up or need to make a change you are screwed.

I would start breaking up each sentence or phrase into separate comps. You can easily do that by pre-composing a few layers at a time. After you have moved a couple of hundred layers to nested comps your vanished layers may reappear. This should be a lesson learned. You will never save any time by trying to edit a long project in AE. Break things up into manageable sizes. I do explainer videos, dynamic text animations and similar things all the time. Most of my comps are less than 10 seconds. The final edit is almost always done in Premiere Pro. On rare occasions, if the project is extremely simple, I'll just nest the comps in the main comp for the final render. A typical simple project would look like this:

Screenshot_2019-03-31 20.43.26_tPHGbQ.png

The frame comps are all phrases of text. In this case, many of them were longer because the narration was very complex. The pre-comps contained logos, character animations, and text. They are all very short. When I completed the first draft there were copy changes on four of the 12 phrases. It took me about a half hour to make those changes and recut, then send the entire project off for the final render. If I had done the entire thing in one comp it would have had about 1400 layers, like your project, and the changes would have taken me days. It would have also taken me a lot longer to do the first cut.

Hopefully, you will be able to recover the missing layers as you start breaking the project down into smaller comps and getting rid of that crazy master comp.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines