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Participant
January 23, 2018
Question

Just like ../ goes up to the parent directory in the command line, can you reference a "parent" (the comp containing the subcomp) composition in after effects?

  • January 23, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 317 views

To start, I need to define what I mean when I say parent. I DON'T mean the literal parent as in you can parent a layer to another layer. What I mean is if a composition contains a subcomposition, it would be the "parent" and the subcomp would be the "child." With this definition, there can only be 1 parent per composition, but one composition can have many children. Press tab and open up the mini workflow to see what I mean.

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I know that you can reference layers by index and name, however, I'm searching for a way to set up an expression that references the parent (see my definition above) composition. Is this possible?

In the command line you reference the parent directory with "../"

This would be extremely useful when duplicating Compositions with many sub compositions with expressions in them.

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1 reply

Dan Ebberts
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 24, 2018

>Is this possible?

No. Comps (other than thisComp) can only be referenced by name. It makes sense, because comps could be nested inside multiple other comps, so there could easily be more than one parent comp.

Dan