Help with audio and pre-comp timing

[Mylenium]

Time remapping with expressions. The audio needs to reside in the sub-comps as well. Sounds a bit like saddling a horse from behind, though. In your case I'd simply create a dedicated audio pre-comp with visual clues (text that says "Here begins section 2" or so) which you can re-use both in your main comp and your sub-comps.

Mylenium

[meatycheesyboy]

You just made me realize something very basic. My problem in my thinking was that I couldn't figure out what to if section 2 started 5 seconds in, would my precomp have a 5 second delay that I would have to trim off in the main comp? But obviously no, I can just have my audio in the precomp start at -5 seconds.

[Mylenium]

I think you're still not clear on my suggestion. with the audio being part of the pre-comp, you could trim and slip/ slide the pre-comp layer in whatever comp you are using it. That's the whole point of it. No need to futz with the pre-comp in any special way after that. The only thing would then be to turn of the redundant audio switches once you assemble everything in your main comp. Multipleinstances of the same audio have a very ugly side-effect, once AE tries to mix them...

Mylenium

[meatycheesyboy]

No, I get what you're saying. Being able to easily move precomps around is what would cause my headaches.

Let me give an example, let's say I have a comp called Final and within that comp I have an audio piece with beats every 1 second. I also have a precomp within that piece called bluebox. I want bluebox to move across the screen and on every beat, I want it to pulsate with an orange glow.

If I have it enter the shot at 1 second then in my precomp I'll need it to pulsate exactly every second, no problem. But what if I decide to change it and I want it to enter the shot 8 frames earlier? Then I have to go into my precomp and update my animation so that it is offset by 8 frames or else it will no longer line up with my audio, right? In this example it's a very simple matter since the beats come at very regular intervals but what if they didn't, what would be the best way of resyncing everything to the audio? The way I'm doing it now is by going into the precomp, adjusting the animation, going to the final comp doing and ram preview, going back into the precomp, adjusting the animation, going back out doing a ram preview, etc. My question is, is there a more streamlined way of doing this?

I think using marker and comments like you mentioned will help me alot but maybe there's more that I'm missing?

BTW, thank you for the help, I appreciate it.

[meatycheesyboy]

Thanks for the help Mylenium, I just realized something that I should have noticed a long time ago. I just noticed that AE is smart enough to track time simultaneously in all the comps at once. So when I move the cursor forward in a pre-comp, the cursor moves in all the other comps as well. This alones makes working with audio much much easier. So consider this problem solved, and chalk it up to me being an idiot.

[Mylenium]

Yepp, it does. ;-)

Mylenium

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