Re: Is this a usable animation method?

Okay, that's better. I went through the tutorial here again, this time while playing along. That cleared up the confusion I had just watching it. This does now seem like a good way to do it, I like the way I can just apply lip sync and eye blinks to the head, then take that and further animate it's position in the final scene setup.

I wonder if having nested compositions adds more complications into the redering process. I noticed a quick test (about 2 seconds of lip sync at the beginning of a 30 second timline) was billed as using 55% of the RAM. Is this number likely to go a lot higher with a more full project? I'm generally thinking of doing only 60 seconds or so per project file, then editing the resulting clips in Final Cut. I'm working on a new Mac Pro with what I though was ample RAM (4 GB), but after seeing what some other users have it seems boderline. I don't have any major RAID setup for rendering either. I hope I'm not in for a world of headaches trying to run this on the low end of things.