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I am looking to divide a 5760 x 1080 comp three ways,
create a composition call it Part 1 and make it 1920x1080. put the main composition 5760x1080 inside it.
drag it to the left hold shift and Ctrl to snap it to the left edge of the composition.
note the X position parameter. it is 2880. you need to move it 1920 each time.
duplicate part 1, open part 2. on the x parameter add after 2880 " -1920"
duplicate part 2, open part 3. repeat the process.
if you want a visual reference to your splits, then in the master composition add a solid layer, set is as a guide layer so it won't render (right click->guide layer) and add the grid effect. set its anchor point to 0,0, size from: width slide, set it to 1920 and set the border to something you could see like this:
There will be some pixel cropping in your projector setup, but most of the time it is not enough to worry about. Make sure you check the specs. I have had as many as 150 lines cut off so it can be a problem if you don't know what the crop and safe areas are.
If this was my project I would create a master comp that is 5760 x 1080, then set up my layers and animation as well as I could. If you know there is going to be a 150 line crop with each projector then you have to figure that in to your Master comp size. If the project is longer than 10 seconds I would make a separate comp for each sentence of narration or phrase of music. Trying to work on a 20-minute presentation in a single comp is, well frankly, NUTS. Personally, I would not worry about where the three render comps are, but if you are really concerned you can always quickly drop in a couple of guides and then lock them.
Now just design and animate you big wide comp. Once you have your pencil tests (animation and motion previews) working the way you want them to work, apply the rest of the effects, check a few frames to make sure everything looks good and then duplicate the master comp 3 times in the Project Panel. Name each comp properly so you can figure out which is which. Something like Shot1 Right, Shot 1 Middle, Shot 1 Left. Consider yourself lucky. Creating your 3 render comps is easy.
Open up the composition settings for the Shot 1 Right comp and change the comp frame size to the standard HD 1920 X 1080 size, then, before you click OK, make sure you go to the Advanced settings select the Right Side of the Anchor option icon to crop the comp.
This will force the right side of the comp to stay put. Do the same for the left side, then make sure the middle comp has the center selected as the anchor. That's all there is to creating three new pixel perfect comps from a single wide comp. If you have more than 3 you have to do some math and set up guidelines to help you crop the comps. It can get a lot more complicated and usually involves parenting and a placeholder HD sized guide layer that you can use to reposition all of the layers.
When you have rendered all of your comps if the project is longer than a few seconds and you have created more than one master comp, just drop all of the rendered Left comps in a PPro sequence or create a new AE comp for them, render that file and repeat for the middle and right side comps. I've done this many many times and it is a lot easier to do using this kind of workflow than any other way. You'll spend a lot of time previewing at 1/4 or 1/8 resolution, and you will quickly get used to the pencil test and then polish workflow so you won't be wasting a lot of time with previews. Expect this project to take 2 to 3 times as long to do as the same kind of animation in a single HD comp because the previews can take longer. The only real way you'll be able to see how the project is going to work without sending it to 3 projectors is to take the Master comps for each shot, Drop them in a standard HD comp and scale them down 33.333% so they fit the horizontal width, and render a preview that will playback on an average system. You'll just have to trust that the final renders will work. I've never had this workflow let me down.
One more suggestion. Make absolutely sure you have the exact format specifications for the playback setup. Running 3 projectors in perfect sync requires special software and special hardware. This multi-stream playback equipment can be very picky about codecs, frame rates, audio and color space.
All good advice above, but just an additional option to consider.
You can design everything in a 5760x1080 comp as discussed. Create Guides to visually define the vertical join lines in your comp.
But, if you're not doing any additional processing to the images before you render, you don't have to create additional comps for output. You can do it straight from the Render Queue.
Send your main comp to the Render Queue as normal. In the Output Module section, click the checkbox to enable Crop. Then define the dimensions you wish to render in a pass. In your case, you will need to have 3 output modules, ones for each video frame. So the dimensions will be:
Output Module 1 (Left) : Top-0, Left-0, Bottom-0, Right 3840
Output Module 2 (Centre) : Top-0, Left-1920, Bottom-0, Right 1920
Output Module 3 (Right) : Top-0, Left-3840, Bottom-0, Right 0
You can save these Output Modules as templates so that you don't need to rewrite the numbers every time. Plus, you can stack multiple Output Modules in one Render Queue item, meaning it only renders the main comp once, then distributes the data to each individual Output Module in one pass.
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