layers not showing on the timeline

[melanied95]

Hi,

see in the screenshot below, all layers at some point disappeared of the timeline. I tried to select all and click on u" to reveal properties and try to make them appear. It did not work. I still see they are there (on the left, the file is here) and I can see the elements in the video but I cannot control the layer to add keyframes... what happened? 

thank you,

[Rick Gerard]

Putting expression controllers in a Main comp has no effect on render time. 

I hope you are not trying to edit a movie in After Effects. Each comp should be one shot or, at most, a transition between two comps. Trying to manage changes on a four or five-minute comp with 1000 layers is going to be a nightmare. I've cut a lot of movies and music videos with hundreds of shots that were created in After Effects, but they were all rendered and then edited in Premiere or another NLE. More than 90% of my comps are under 7 seconds because most shots in a movie, commercial, or music video are under seven seconds. Here's a flowchart for a typical composite.

If I remember correctly, 2 of the comps in the first column were rendered, all of the comps in the second column were rendered, then the Main comp was rendered to create a scene that lasted about eight seconds. I could go back into any of the comps in the third column and make changes, re-render, then re-render the main comp in a lot less time than it would take to render the whole project. Consider a similar workflow for your thousand-plus layered comps. 

[jonas1024]

Thanks for your reply and advice!

No, I am not trying to edit a movie. 😉 I am cloning the same person to reveal with the camera an army of them, that then slowly form into circles in the shape of an eye. With each beat a new circle comes from the inside while the others open up a bit more. 

I don't know if there is some professional clone tool for after effects. In Cinema 4D there is clone effector. 

It's a typical case of animating as you go without having a clear vision/storyboard, somehow I just ended up with a thousand layers but so far I can preview everything with half resolution and render time is about an hour for the whole minute so I guess it's okay. But I am starting now to precomp the clone groups.

How would you go about clong one layer several times in 3D space in AE?

[Rick Gerard]

I once did a battle charge by keying six different actors in six little square comps. The bodies were motion stabilized, so it looked like they were running in place. The first and last frames were one frame less than identical so that I could loop the videos in AE and make them run forever.

The next step was to create a bunch of motion paths on a shape layer that followed the terrain. Then I dropped the rendered keyed movies of the actors in the comp. They were all set to loop indefinitely in the footage interpolation settings. By randomly attaching each of the six different actors to motion paths, I ended up with about 600 actors running across the battlefield. That comp was rendered with no background.

I then added an Adjustment Layer to a copy of the everybody running comp, turned them all white with a black background, made a couple of copies of those layers, and added some blur and scaling to create a shadow pass and a random lighting pass. Those comps were then rendered. 

I used the motion paths to create 600 dust trails using fractal noise and rendered that. 

Then I stacked up all of the renders in the Main comp with the original background plate turned on, fiddled with opacity and blend modes, added a final color grading adjustment layer, and ended up with 600 soldiers running across a field. Maybe something like that would work for you.

You could also do something similar if you used a bunch of cropped and scaled looping videos of your actors as particles for Particular. 

I hope some of these suggestions help.

[jonas1024]

Thank you, they actually do help a lot!

A lot of things you mentioned I already followed. Every soldier is in a precomp, where it's looped and effects to the soldier are placed. I also always make a Footage container just for the footage, so I can turn on and off proxies.

I realized though, that I haven't rendered this pre-comp yet, I guess that would help speed up things a lot. 😉

Instead of motion paths I created formulas with control layers on the position/rotation/anchor point/etc. properties.

And then I got a bit lost and lazy and just through everything in this comp where the 1000 soldiers were already hanging out. Making these pre-comps now with Transformation Collapsed helped lot. 

I preferred this over Particular or Form because using these soldiers as a particle on a grid would have slowed down performance much more and I just prefer having Null layers as Control Layers. 

Did you put some sort of Echo effect on the 6 actors in the shape layer so they would be 600? Sounds like a lot smarter than what I did. But I wanted to have the soldiers be in rows first and then change into circles which I could not manage with shape layers because the paths are closed. 

Anyways, you sound really experienced! Cna you recommend any courses/books regarding smart workflows to not end up in render hell? One day I'd really like to sit down and learn some things properly. 

[Rick Gerard]

I did not use Echo. I just randomized the attachment of 100 copies of my six actors to various motion paths and offset the starting point of each layer.

I mimicked a great visual effects breakdown demo I saw years ago at NAB. The looping videos were used as random texture maps on 3D cubes moving over a landscape. I don't remember the 3D app used. It might have been Blender, but it might have been Maya. I made a phone video of the demo, then made notes and saved them. I ended up using the workflow in AE a few years later.

[Pat23672689j32v]

I'm having the same issue. I've got 1,800 dots that I'm putting into a Newton 3 physics simulation. I need that exact number for reasons tied to the story. At 964 the layers just stop. I need to ofset them by a few frames. Very weird. Seems like a new thing. I've done a similar animation a couple of years ago and didnt run into this issue. I'll give the shying method a try.

 

[Pat23672689j32v]

Update. How interesting. I offset all the layers. It looked like it only offset up to layer 964 but once I shyed I could see that it offset all of them. It seems to be a display issue because those layers are still taking direction.