This blog is about After Effects, Cinema 4D,
Scripting, Workflow, and the best ways for
you to set like, uh, 1 million keyframes today.
A Fine Motion Graphics Blog
Nesting Cameras in After Effects Using Expressions
Posted: May 2nd, 2008
I use this technique in a lot of my projects, and I have seen others use it too it’s a pretty common task - but what I don’t see very often is people using the activeCamera property. If you don’t use activeCamera and instead write your expressions with hard-coded layer names, you’re bound to break your expression somewhere down the line. This video will show you how and why to use activeCamera when nesting AE cameras into precomps.

May 3rd, 2008 at 5:18 am
Cool trick!
Thanks for sharing!
May 5th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Hey Chris,
Nice little tip! Found your blog about a month ago and check it every couple of days. Great resource .. always appreciate people giving back to the community.
Cheers! John
May 5th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Thanks! I’m glad you both are enjoying this stuff. If you ever have anything in particular you would like to see, just leave it in the comments and I’ll put something together - thanks again for reading!
October 24th, 2008 at 3:10 am
nice tutorial ,very informative
January 5th, 2009 at 11:35 am
thanks for the tute–wondering what the addition to the expression is for offsetting layers in time. I often need to increase or decrease the duration of certain portions of the composition and as a result move precomps around on the timeline….