Advice on scene panning workflow

[EltonJohnisPlumpandDreamy]

I’m in the process of designing concert visuals, trying to do something similar to the video below–not the physical props, just what’s on the screen.

I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around this workflow and could use some advice on how to approach it. As you can see, this panoramic scene is scrolling right to left. The way I figured to go about it is by stitching a lot of pre-rendered comps together horizontally, into one very long comp, and then layering more stuff to obscure the seams. I thought I could pan the giant comp sideways with position keyframes. But then I notice in the video, it looks like some elements scroll at different paces and gives a parallaxed feel. I wondered if it was actually a camera panning across the scene. Would that make more sense, do you think? I want to go for the same type of effect.

I’m also running into trouble with timing because each of my comps is not really a loop, it’s a linear animation that should play when the scene scrolls on screen. So I figured I should stagger the comps on the timeline so they only appear when they’re about to come onscreen, but it makes cohesive scrolling very difficult to make sure there are no black gaps right before each comp appears. I don’t know if that’s making any sense. My main question is, how might you approach this workflow in broad steps, and do you think a camera panning across a giant comp is better than position keyframes to get the sideways movement?

Thanks!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siEKvYLK964 

[RobertWiebe]

Hi there,

a good solution would be to put all your screen elements in a composition of the size you want your final video to be. Then, you can turn all of them into 3D layers and slightly change the new Z-position property for all of the layers to move them farther away or closer to the camera. Now you can create a new null object and parent all of your layers to it. You can now scoll your scene by moving the null object horizontally and use that to place all of your layers along the scene. In the final video, you can now animate the null objects x-position property to create the scrolling with parallax-effect. To solve the timing issue, I'd suggest to loop all the layers. This can be done by right-clicking the layers individually, and choosing "enable time remapping". Then you can alt-click on the keyframe symbol next to the new time remapping property and enter the expression loopOut() into the entry field and the animation will be played over and over again.

I hope this helps.

[EltonJohnisPlumpandDreamy]

Thank you RobertWiebe! This is excellent advice and I will be following it. I think nulls will work much better than what I was doing.