From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 08 Nesting and Precomposing

Overview - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 08 Nesting and Precomposing

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Overview

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- Hi, I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Design, and welcome to the After Effects Apprentice lesson on nesting and precomposing. One of the strengths of After Effects is you don't have to do everything in one composition or in one timeline. You can go ahead and create an element in one composition, drag that comp into a second composition. It'll be treated just as if it was a single footage item. You don't have to manage all those layers individually in the final comp. There's lots of uses for this. For example, you can create a small element or a small bug in one comp and reuse it in multiple compositions throughout the chain. Or, you can create a much larger composition, say a map or a very wide panorama, and pan around that composition inside a second comp. Trish will then show you how to precompose. We select one or more layer in the current composition, then send it back up the chain to a precomp, a previous composition that's nested in the one you're currently working in. This is really handy when you need to group layers, perhaps for applying an effect, or to rewire the rendering order inside After Effects to get it to do something different than it normally would do. Then at the end we'll show you an Idea Corner of how to finish off one of the comps we were working on, challenge you with a few Quizzlers to see what you've learned, and also give you a few sidebar movies related to nesting and precomposing, including how to navigate a hierarchy of compositions. This is where you start to really become an expert After Effects user, where you get the idea of setting up a hierarchy of comps that will make your life much easier when it comes time to animate or accommodate client changes. So let's dive in and have some fun.

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