I just finished up a project for my class and realized that After Effects stops playing my project at 14.29s when it says my project is 15s long. Even after I render it the video stops at 14.29s. I have all of the components extended to the very end so I'm quite confused as to why it isn't working. Any suggestions?
When you are on the last frame of your composition you see the last frame. It still has to play. If you set your comp length to 15 seconds then the last frame starts one frame before the end of the video so the clock will read 14:29 when your comp is 30 frames per second.
If your comp is 29.97 frames per second the timecode will automatically be set to drop-frame timecode. This does not mean that frames will be dropped, it means that frame numbers will be skipped. If the time counter did not drop a frame here and there then the counter, the timecode, would be off. Just so you know, before color TV all television broadcasts in countries that have 60Hz power (NTSC Standard) were running at exactly 30 frames per second. When color came along the engineers needed to insert a little more information to give us a color picture. These extra lines or scan lines of information took .03-seconds to keep everything running smoothly they just slowed down the frame rate to 29.97 frames per second. They came up with drop-frame timecode to fix the timing problems the clock would not be off by on second and 24 frames every half hour. One more time, the drop frame timecode does not drop frames, it does not count them all so the time indication is correct down to the closest frame. In the other parts of the world where the power is 50Hz (PAL standard), the engineers had enough room in their 25 frames per second frame rate to just add the color info to some lines that were not being used for anything so they did not have to lower the frame rate to get color in a PAL signal.
I hope that makes sense. If you see something in the composition panel that frame has not played yet so the layer will last one frame longer than the time indicator says it will. In After Effects, if you go to the last frame you will see the last frame because that makes it easier to line up visual effects and check the position of an animation. If you go to the out point in a nonlinear editor you will not see the last frame of a clip, you will see the start of the next cut because it is easier to judge edits when you see the next frame that is coming. You will get used to it. All compositing apps work that way.
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