3.2 Precomposing

In this lesson you are going to learn about precomposing, many times in after effects you'll be working on something and you will need to precompose your layers. Maybe it's something as simple as you have a text element that you need to use multiple times and rather than duplicating your text, you can precompose it. Let me show you how it works. So let's say for example, I had a text layer that I wanna use multiple times in a composition or maybe in several compositions. Now, I'll just change this to something a little bit more relevant, something like that. That makes sense. Now, if this were just in this comp and I wanted to use this multiple times, that's no problem. I can just duplicate it, by hitting control D on the keyboard or you come up here to the menu and go to edit, duplicate. What you can see is Control D on the keyboard. So, I can just do that multiple times and I can make lots of duplicates of this text. And I can change each one of this. Like if I wanted to, say scale this one up. Scale this down or rotate any number of these. Even change the color of this different layers, I can. And kinda arrange them in a graphical way, as a design element if you will. But what if I did this and then I wanted to actually change the source of the text? So I didn't want all of these layers to say text, I wanted them to say something else? That can be a little bit annoying because now, I have to select each layer and either grab the type tool and select them and Change it to something else, which can be very tedious. Or with the selection tool, I can just double click on one of this text layers, which will select all the text And I can change them. But again, that can be very tedious. So instead, I'm gonna show you how to precompose this to save yourself a little bit of work. I'm just going to delete all of this And then with this one text layer selected, I'm going to precompose it. So, I'm gonna come up to the menu go to layer, precompose. Get a little dialog box here. And I'm just gonna leave everything right here. You can rename it if you want, but this is fine for now. If you look right down here, you will see this little icon here. This is a composition. So, I've essentially put a composition inside my composition. And the advantage of this is, now I can duplicate this composition Multiple times and if I wanna change the source, all I have to do is going to this one comp right here, this text comp one and just change this. And now, we'll update on all of this other layers. They can see the bounding box is kind of weird on this and it makes it a little bit difficult to select it, so let me show you how to fix that. Wanna jump back over to my text comp here. What I wanna do is, change the comp size so that it's just around my text here. So what I can do is, right down here in a comp panel there's a button called region of interest. And when you use that, it will give you this little crosshair reticule. And you can click and drag A selection area. And then kind of size it so it just fits your text, or just about. And then you can come up to the menu. And choose composition, crop, comp, to region of interest. And now if I jump back to my ten second comp, Things have moved around a little bit. Which is not a big deal. But now when I select these layers, you can see that now this transform handles here with a bounding box for this layer, is much more appropriately sized and in fact, we can get it even better if we zoom up on this. We can select that region of interest again and then draw and even tighter box around the text. Composition, crop to region of interest, perfect. And that won't change much because, we didn't really move the text around. And now, this gives you a nice little precomp here with some text in it, that you can use multiple times and you can resize this, Really big and that will look not super great, unless you turn on this button here which is the continuously rasterize button, or it's also known as the collapse transformation button. But because after effects knows that the thing inside this comp is, essentially a vector graphic, it's text. You can scale it well, almost forever without it ever looking blurry if you have this switch on here, this collapse layer transformation or continuously rasterize button here. You can see without it, it looks kinda janky but with it, it looks super sharp and you can go And you can go crazy with the scale at 17,000 scale. I'm just gonna reset that. Now you have this nice little text precomp, and you can even use the precomp here and you can use it in other comps. So you could go back to the starter comp. And you can take this text comp and bring it out here. And you're saying, no. Well now, it's black on something with wealth doesn't have any background but, no problem. We can come over here to the effects and presets panel. And you can grab an effect called fill. So you just type fill in there, and then you can grab the fill right here. An drag it on to your layer And this will fill all of the opaque pixels, with whatever color that you choose. So, check that out. Now i have this other text layer And I can change the color, and I can use it as many times as I want and put all kinds of effects on it, and it's just a really handy way to use one asset, over and over. And you will see this in after effects templates all of the time. You can create wild effects with text and other layers by using the same element over and over and stacking it and repositioning it and applying effects to those layers. And precomping it, is a really easy way to do that and that way if you ever wanna change the text, to something different You can do that In order to update in all of your compositions, so that's just a really quick look at precomposing. Coming up in the next lesson, you're going to learn about layer properties, so check that up coming up next.