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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….
January 28th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Great tutorial, is there any reason why the expression won’t work on the cameras’s rotation property? When I try this:
comp(”main_comp”).activeCamera.zRotation
I get the error:
class ‘Camera’ has no property or method named ‘zRotation’
January 28th, 2009 at 10:09 am
@ben
You’ll have to access the zRotation property through a full reference to the property, which basically just means add ‘transform’ before ‘zRotation’, like this:
comp(”main_comp”).activeCamera.transform.zRotation
That should work for you, good luck!
March 10th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Thank you for explain it. A long time I thougt collapse transformation is the sollution for all complex 3D Works in AE. But it came out that it sometimes even messes up some stuff (like Blendmodes or intersecting Layers). Your technique is A great workaround. BTW. nice Blog, keep it rolling!
March 27th, 2009 at 3:35 am
[...] Nesting Cameras in After Effects Using Expressions [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:43 am
There’s another pitfall if I remember correctly. For some reason, activeCamera expressions throw errors when rendering via the command line—as late as CS3—even if the expression is in the same comp as the camera you’re trying to get data from.
I think I figured that out when I tried to use a linear expression with blur on a 2D layer to match the camera’s DOF.
Obviously, not many people render via the command line but those who do would probably like to know this beforehand.
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