Why I can't animate keyframes of a color control?

[Upside24438435cg7v]

I have multiple pre-compositioned elements linked to a null object with a color control. It's working to change those all colors at once but when I hit the stopwatch on the color of a  null object to animate the colors it's not working. I found an information that it should be working just like any other element with a stopwatch but it's not, please help

[Dan Ebberts]

You have to add another keyframe at a different time with a different color to get it to animate. Just move the current time indicator to a new time and change the color (the new keyframe should happen automatically). Sorry if you knew this already.

[Konrad5E58]

Same issue - thanks for the anwer but I do know how to animate in general. The issue only appears when I'm doing the same thing I would do for changing a rectangle's color, but on a color control - then it's not working

[Dan Ebberts]

Ah, OK. I suspect that you have colors in a precomp linked to controls in a main comp, but the precomp layers in the main comp don't start at time = 0. If that's the case, you need to compensate for the offset start time. So where you have an expression like this in the precomp:

comp("Main").layer("controls").effect("Color Control")("Color")

you need to change it to something like this:

C = comp("Main");
ctrl = C.layer("controls").effect("Color Control")("Color");
L = C.layer(thisComp.name);
ctrl.valueAtTime(time + L.startTime)

[Konrad5E58]

Thank you, yes you get it exactly and I was sure your solution would work but for some reason it didn't allow to animate the color control's color value 😕 Of course I replaced "Main" and "controls" with the names of my master board and the control layer name but still no animation. Maybe there's a better way - all I did is a loop of a precomposition with use of loopOut and now I want to change colors of the looped elements - that's why I used color control and also, as you suggested why they don't start at the same time. Is there maybe a simpler way to animate the colors of looped shapes and text?

[Dan Ebberts]

Hard to say without seeing it, but this caught my attention: "all I did is a loop of a precomposition". How did you do that, exactly?

[Konrad5E58]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4R47Ihv_r4 - exactly like that. Also used the same method to loop a shape. Now, in the main comp I'd like to animate the color of the text and shape at some point. Color control let's me change the color of those elements but I can't animate it, even after replacing code to yours. That's the whole issue. Thank you so much for your help, I really hope we'll manage to make it work 🙂