From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

How can I combine multiple compositions into one? - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

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How can I combine multiple compositions into one?

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- As you build in After Effects, you might end up with multiple compositions that you want to assemble. Now, typically, I like to render these out and take them into an application like Premiere where I can play with music in real time and really finesse things as I adjust small frame-based edits. But you can put multiple compositions together inside of After Effects as well, whether you intend to video edit or you just want to really keep things a bit more organized. Let me show you a few essential techniques. You can keep working with the previous project file or open up 2_4 Start. When you double-click on footage here, it loads into the footage layer. What this allows you to do is you can go through and actually mark in points and out points. This is like video editing, and you can actually specify the parts of a clip you want. You'll notice then as well that you actually have Insert and Overwrite edit, and it tells you where it's going to go, the target here of the sequence. Let's make a new composition for a moment. I'll click New Comp, and I'm just going to call this Assembly. And I'll set this to 1080, 24 frames per second, and we'll make it 10 seconds long, 10:00. All right, let's go back to that footage layer for a moment, there it is, and when I click the Edit button, you see it adds it right into the project, respecting the ins and out points. That's quite nice. Additionally, besides layering in clips that way, you can also drag the items in. So let's go ahead and delete that and try something a little bit different. I'm going to select the Title Card here and drag that in. Let's drag through here, see the initial animation. I like it. Then around the five-second mark, I want to go into that looped scene, and I'll just drop that in. And we can adjust the end point on that by dragging the footage. Let's press t for Opacity and the i key will move me to the in point and I can easily adjust. Now you're going to learn more about keyframes later, but effectively, what I did there was a little crossfade. You see that we have the initial footage with the title, which worked nicely, and then we go into the Open. I can actually drag to reposition that as well. If I need to, I can go to the Composition Settings here and easily adjust the total duration. Let's make that 15, and we can expand. And notice, this gives you greater control over layering things together. Earlier, I also showed you one other technique. That one allowed you to select multiple items in the order that you wanted to use them and then tell it to create a new composition from the selection. The order that you clicked on them, while holding down the Command or the Control Key, will actually set the order. And this can create a single comp and edit them all together. If you choose to Sequence, it will actually overlay them all and create a rough edit like you see here where it put them together in the order that was selected, like so, which is pretty cool. All right, let's go ahead here, I'm just going to undo that last step. Now I would suggest that you be careful with your names. Here we have Title Card, which is the individual title card. But here, with Title Card 2, we have that rough edit. So I'm going to call this Assembly, and that just strings the clips out. Here is my Fine Assembly where I chose the clips a little more precisely. In any case, it's up to you, but notice that you're in complete control when it comes to putting multiple compositions together into a new comp. Just be mindful that you ideally want to match the frame size and the frame rate for best results.

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