Is there a shortcut to align beginning of pre comp to playhead in AE?

[Dr ZeroThrE]

Hey folks, wondering if anyone can tell me the shortcut to align the beginning of a precomp to the playhead in AE, or even just to the exact beginning of the comp?  I know how to align and snap the active, visible section of a precomp to the playhead using “[“ or “]” but can’t figure out how to align the actual beginning of the pre comp to the playhead or even the comp beginning.  Thanks for any info!

[Rick Gerard]

Try using the left and right square bracket key [ or ] to snap the start or end of a layer to the CTI (Current Time Indicator).

[Dr ZeroThrE]

Thanks for responding - using the bracket keys only aligns the active section of a precomp to the CTI, but doesn’t align the ACTUAL beginning of a pre comp layer to the CTI (if that makes sense).  

[Rick Gerard]

It aligns the layer in-point or out-point. There is nothing that will align the layer start or end time. I'm not sure why you would want to do that. It doesn't make much sense for editing. There is nothing before an in-point that AE or any NLE will use to calculate new pixels. 

[Dr ZeroThrE]

Yeah, it's not something I've even needed to do before.  I have about 350 precomps all with pre comps within them on a 25 minute timeline (huge project, I know).  At some point a bunch of the top level precomps got shifted over which messes up the timing in a cascading effect throughout the whole project.  I was just trying not to have to go one at a time down the 350 pre comps and manually line them up with the very beginning of the timeline top level comp if I didn’t have to - but I may have to.

[Rick Gerard]

I can honestly say I have never had a 25-minute AE comp. I would be looking for ways to cut the comp up into shots or short sequences. Never had a project that had one shot that needed to last for 25 minutes. My longest comps are one phrase or one idea. A 20-second comp is very unusual because a sentence or phrase of music, or even an idea can usually be delivered in less than 10 seconds. 

The only thing I can suggest is that you select all of the nested comps that need to be re-aligned and pre-compose them again, trimming the pre-comp to the length of the layers, then sliding the group into the right position, so timing is restored. If the layers are randomly out of sync, you're kind of stuck.

You might be able to write a script that puts a layer marker at the current in-point, then reset the in-point to the start of the layer, then moves the layers to the CTI, then resets the in-point of every layer to the layer marker. 

[Dr ZeroThrE]

Yeah, I'll give that a try - thanks for the info, appreciate it!