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Altering precomps

Posted: August 29th, 2005, 6:37 pm
by sycophant
Let's imagine I have a composition, and as a layer of that I have another composition with a country map on it.

In my map composition there are about 60 layers which I want to be able to enable or disable, and alter some effect settings.

My script takes a template composition (that includes the map comp as a layer), duplicates it, changes some text and renames the new comp (deleting any previous comp with that name). Now for each of these duplicate comps, I want to be able to enable different map layers without affecting the content of the other duplicates.

I'm pretty sure I can't actually do that the way I have it set up. The only way I can think to do it is to move all those layers from my map comp into my template comp so they are duplicated into each new comp and I can affect them seperately.

Am I right? Will each of my map layers need to exist on it's own, or is there another way I could do this (I have considered duplicating the map comp at the same time and including it in the duplicated template comp, but that doesn't seem any more efficent, and will actually just make even more comps to deal with).

This is part of my ongoing election graphics making project. Basically I am creating electorate results graphics for each electorate, with the top three candidates, vote numbers, percent counted, and a small map of the elecorate location.

Posted: August 30th, 2005, 2:47 am
by Mylenium
I'm not entirely sure, but i think you will have to duplicate your template map comp along with your other comp and then simply delete all layers that you don't need for that specific region. This seems to be the safest road.

Mylenium

Posted: August 30th, 2005, 4:39 pm
by Dan Ebberts
Yes, and if you do it that way you'll also have to go into the duplicate main comp and replace the instance of the template map comp with the new duplicate of that comp.

I think your other idea is better - move the maps into the main template.

Dan