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So I'm pretty new to After Effects. I've used it for a few things in the past year, but I want to get a bit more familiar with it. I'm fairly good with Premiere, but I have trouble wrapping my head around After Effects sometimes, in terms of losing my place and what I'm working on.
What brings me here specifically is I was using the Roto Brush tool on a composition. I was outlining what I could, frame by frame, trying to get comfortable with how it works. All of a sudden (I mean, I must've pressed a wrong button accidentally), the composition goes further up in the timeline and I lose all the frames I outlined before I had a chance to freeze and render. 'Undo' didn't bring me back to where I was. Even after finally figuring out how to drag the timeline marker back to where I was working, the work was gone.
What could I have done? And how can I fix this in the future? I was working on this for hours, and it's undoubtedly frustrating not knowing what I did wrong. Similar things like this have happened in the past with AE, and I need to know what I'm doing wrong. The work was nothing major, just me messing around trying to get comfortable with AE, but I'd like to figure things out before I lose real work next time.
Please help!
Thanks!
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Carefully go through some good rotobrush tutorials to make sure you are doing everything you should. The most likely source of the problem is not expanding the range. It is difficult to see no matter what display settings you use.
Do you see it there just below and about 4 frames to the left of 56:37f?
The other problem folks run into is trying to rotobrush a shot that is too long or they try and isolate way too much of the scene and they just run out of system resources.
If you still can't fix the problem we need workflow, system, AE version info, and a screenshot that shows us what you are working with. Make sure the modified properties of the layer you are working on are showing by pressing the 'u' key twice and make sure the footage is selected in the Project Panel so we can tell what you are working with. Embed the screenshot using the toolbar on the forum and we should be able to help you figure it out.
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Thanks! I will try to be aware if I'm expanding the range on the timeline next time. There's just so much nuance to this tool and I've never had formal instruction with it like I've had with Premiere. I appreciate the insight.
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Right there in the User Guide. available in the AE Home screen, the AE Product Page, and on this forum is a decent tutorial on using Rotobrush. Just scroll down a bit and you'll find it.
It will do you good to go through a lot of the beginning tutorials. You'll save more time than you spend learning.