Changing the duration of the playback time of whole animation

[Sascha Block]

I'm new to Adobe After Effects and I'm working with Audition, Premiere and After Effects. In all three application the control seems to be quite different in order to manage to set the time scale of the part of the animation I'm acutally working with.

In the screenshot below you can see the After effects project I am actually working in:

 I am now working in the middle of the project and like to know how to instruct after effects that 

- the whole animation is played

- that a specified part ist played, having controll about the loop lenght of this playback part

I really searched google and youtube before after I tried to manage that about nearly an hour now.

I would expect the controll of this feature somewhere here, or on right mouse click.

It's frustrating, due to the fact that in Adobe After effects 

It's all about the controll of that red line intervall, which seems to be at the moment limited to about 2 seconds, than it loops to the beginning again:

I also checked => composition => composition settings => duration:

 

This has no effect and seems to be the wrong area for this control...

It would be very kindfull if someone of you could give me and others who might also search this a understandable solution.

Thank you very much!

 

[Mylenium]

Pre-compose, enable time-remapping in the parent comp, create some keyframes and duplicate the layer as needed. Magic!

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/precomposing-nesting-pre-rendering.html

Mylenium

[Sascha Block]

@Mylenium Thank you for your response. The Topic mentioned seems to be right, but your solution "create some keyframes and duplicate the layer as needed. Magic!" does is not suitable solution for the problem...

That did work once to play the whole sence. So it does not seem to make sense to add a new layer or adding something that is not needed. There are settings that have been changed somehow. 

[Sascha Block]

 

There is already a useful project structure and I simply want to select and play the final comp.

[Mylenium]

Not sure what you're saying. You can pre-compose as many levels deep as you need/ want to and you can do so for only the layers that actually need retiming. Getting strung up on an existing structure is perhaps not that productive. Of course you may have to re-jig a few things to facilitate the process.

Mylenium

[Sascha Block]

@Mylenium As your level indicates, you are a legend. It's just a bit strange that I can't get a clear answer to a simple question, but only the magic reference to a documentary follows... 

[Mylenium]

Again, I'm really not sure what you are expecting. It seems like you are looking for a magic way to get your loops to play and that's just not how things work. you have to pre-compose the relevant parts, enable time-remapping in the parent comp and then duplicate the comp-based layer as needed, cutting and trimming it as needed while changing the keyframing of your time-remapping to accomodate your "play once, then loop" behavior.

Mylenium

[Sascha Block]

The project works fine and generates the output as expected. I simply want that the software adobe animation plays the whole animation from timestamp 0:00 to the end which is about 60 seconds.

At the moment is simply plays a loop of a three seconds part and I do not know where and how to change that setting. Probably it's to simple to imagine that users that do not use that software all day long might not find such features...

[Mylenium]

Preview without rendering in After Effects

Mylenium