Nested Composition Navigator with mini flow chart
Sophisticated compositions often involve nesting one composition inside another. One benefit of nesting is that you can apply an effect to the entire comp as a layer. Another benefit of nesting is just to break down a complicated task into smaller, easier to manage tasks.
For me, there has always been a trade-off between nesting comps and coping with a really deeply-layered timeline. If I used a lot of comps and kept each timeline with fewer layers, it seemed to make more sense. But then I’d have to search through the Project Panel for the comp and try to remember which one was nested where. Because of that, I tended to make really deep compositions with 15 or 20 layers in it and only a couple of nested comps.
Nested Composition Navigator is a popup tool that floats above the Canvas window. It shows a miniature flow diagram of the compositions with their nesting relationships (Figure 11). When you click on it, it displays the current composition being edited. In this example, Comp 1 is being edited, and Comp 1 is nested inside Comp 2. Comp 3 and Comp 4 are nested inside Comp 1. The continuation arrow button shows that Comp 4 has more Comps nested inside of it.
Nested Composition Navigator makes it much easier to organize a project into nested compositions without worrying about losing track of the relationships.
The Cartoon Effect
A cartoon effect involves two activities that are cross-purposes. On the one hand, in the color regions of the image you are trying to reduce the detail and get a smooth almost watercolor gradation without posterizing the color and without it bleeding outside of its location in the original image. On the other hand, you are trying to find exact edges and turn them into ink-like linework that doesn’t vibrate annoyingly like dancing ants. When I’ve tried to do this on my own in native After Effects, the number of layers and nested comps rapidly builds and the render time slows to a crawl, and still the effect isn’t very good.
The new CS4 Cartoon Effect provides a turnkey solution that looks great and works fast, because it is using the power of your computer’s accelerated graphics hardware. Figure 12 shows one example. This is the same shot as in Figure 1 if you want to compare it to the original.
