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Nesting Cameras in After Effects Using Expressions

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.

17 Comments on “Nesting Cameras in After Effects Using Expressions”

  1. M20

    Cool trick!
    Thanks for sharing!

  2. jasfish

    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

  3. Chris Kelley

    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!

  4. tapan

    nice tutorial ,very informative

  5. ryan

    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….

  6. ben

    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’

  7. Chris Kelley

    @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!

  8. illd

    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!

  9. 1001 Adobe After Effects Tutorials | FilmmakerIQ.com

    [...] Nesting Cameras in After Effects Using Expressions [...]

  10. Joe Clay

    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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