Maximum Allowed Comp Duration

[Tomas B. aka Tom10]

Hello guys, I found one interesting thing to share and discuss about comp durations. 

Most likely you saw at some point that maximum allowed time / comp is 10800 seconds, aka 3 hours.

I didn't find a way to set longer duration through GUI nor scripting.

However, if trying to import project from Premiere, which are specifically made for +3H - this limitation of 10800 gets passed through. So lets say, comp of 5H's can be achieved this way. But if you go to edit comp settings - it gets trimmed down to 3H baseline again 🙂 I would expect that importing of the project should fail (if 10800 limitation is real), but it doesn't.

Do you happen to know the reasons why it might be this way? This also works in the same way if you change display start time from zeroes - only 3h are maintained when done manually in AE.

Cheers!

P.S. No, I am not making 10h video yet, haha - but looking for options to a create long timeline (even though it might look not practical). Splitting it into multiple comps is doable, but thats not the point of this thread.

[Mrtn Ritter]

If the 3h+ comp playes through and work till the end, then it seems that the 3h limit is just by design, but not by ability.

It's "the software will break if this value is higher than this limit" vs. "I don't want people enter a higher value, because I said so".

Technically, it's something like:

limit = 100;
value = app.ui.inputfield.value
if (value > limit)
{
   value = limit;
}

Now you have an interface to another software and the duration of the comp is not set through the UI elements, but through this interface. The limit is not included in this routine. It can be just missed, or simply not necassary.

*Martin

[Tomas B. aka Tom10]

Thanks for your response. The thing is that Premiere import of a project allows to playback longer than 3h duration - but as soon as any comp settings modified or re-opened - limitation gets back.

What it does not enable (and its expected) - is to add items exceeding 10800 start time - thus, its a workaround into... Emptyness 🙂 If anyone has ideas how this can be tricked the other way - happy to discuss! 

[Mrtn Ritter]

"but as soon as any comp settings modified or re-opened - limitation gets back" - My guess is, that the PR import writes directly into the project file, bypassing all UI-related check ups. From your report, such a check up is implemented in the comp settings dialog.

Maybe there is a trick to get a layer starting beyond 10800 using your PR hack. The real question is, how deep the 3h limit is implemented into AE. So you might get the layer there, but can't add a keyframe or stuff like this.

Some years ago, we had hundreds of layers in a comp and at some point, they appear just as layer names, but not as graphical bar anymore while the whole UI lagged as hell.

Would be interesting how to decypher the AE project file. I think it should be doable to overwrite the starting point of a layer directly.

*Martin