Can I save a AE loop and re-import it into AE?
by tdellaringa
on
Oct 29, 2007 at 11:00:49 pm
Hi there,
I'm new to AE so I hope this isn't a dumb question. I watched the total training videos but they didn't go beyond the very basics. Doesn't seem to be any good online tutorials that I can find.
I've grabbed 8 frames from a quicktime movie and traced them in illustrator using livetrace. I think imported those native AI files into AE and assembled them into 16 frames, which makes a loop.
I want to use this loop as the introduction to my movie as I roll in some credits and a logo - maybe something like 20 seconds.
I figured maybe I could save out this loop and re-import it back into AE as one loop/movie instead of the whole group of native AI files - but I'm not sure this is the best way to go about it, because I'll still need to "loop my loop" as it were for 20 seconds or so.
Hope this is making sense, I'm not quite sure what the best way to proceed is. I'm assuming duping my 16 frame loop say 10 times in the timeline to get my intro animation isn't the best idea, and I'm concerned about the file size getting really big. But I don't know how else to go about it.
Re: Can I save a AE loop and re-import it into AE? by tdellaringa on Oct 29, 2007 at 11:51:39 pm
Thanks, not sure how I missed that... the term "library" didn't jump out at me. I will look at those tutes for sure.
I found that I could export my sequence by selecting my composition and rendering to a movie. It's 1:06 long so I'd probably want it to loop some 20 times.
The rendered lossless avi is 18MB though. I know working with visual media gives you large files. I'm planning on adding like 10 more movie clips (say 10 MB each) plus a bunch of pictures and text and then doing some effects. I do have a relatively new PC with 1 GIG of RAM. Just wondering if I will be okay doing it this and if these are typical files sizes.
Maybe there's a better format than AVI to export and re-import it as - or maybe I don't even need to do that, although I can't figure out how to get the composition I made in the timeline to loop - thus I exported it.
Re: Can I save a AE loop and re-import it into AE? by yikesmikes on Oct 30, 2007 at 12:40:06 am
Just render out that 1:06 worth, then when you Import, right click the footage in the Project Window and Interpret Footage>Main, then choose how many times you want it to loop (down near the bottom), twenty it sounds like, now the footage will loop twenty times and you won't need to render out the 20 second plus clip.
You could also put your little loop in a comp of it's own (or precomp them), then put that in the main comp and to that precomp ;layer, Layer>Enable Time Remapping, then add a loop expression to Time Remapping, (Copy the expression, Alt Click the Time Remapping Stopwatch, then Paste):
loopOut("cycle")
This will cause those 16 frames to loop endlessly, not rendering needed. It loops those two time remapping keyframes.
At some point you'll need to drag that right edge of the clip to the far right as when you apply time remapping, now you can extend the clip to the right.
