Responsive design – Time and loop animation
It's been successful utilizing MOGRT system with my team. Especially the responsive design – Time feature allows us so many possibilities.
I generally export MOGRTs to the shared CC library and my team access it through Essential Graphics panel or Libraries panel in Premiere Pro.
Here's my question.(or a request if not possible)
How can I keep the loop animation speed 100% while changing the length in the timeline?
For example, let's say if I create a lower third with a protected intro/outro animation and add a looping backplate. Everything will work as expected except the loop animation will be stretched once the length is changed. Technically, it is correct, however, I wonder if there's a way to keep the speed of the looping animation? I've tried few things with Expression but no luck.
I wish there's a feature like "Protected Speed" so certain layers or pre-comps with loopOut() Expression can be protected and played in a normal speed while utilizing responsive design – Time.
Kyung Ko
shared this idea
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Ole Kristensen
commented
What I would suggest would be to expose a property called 'unstrechedTime' or 'parentTime' or, 'hostTimeline' (nomenclature is up to you) on a layer or comp that would allow expressions to do calculations to solve the above using the time from Premiere, ideally with both a relative and an absolute time.
I've done it when nesting a responsive comp and stretching it by exposing a 'unstrechedTime' slider as an essential property. Then in the parent comps layer, i've set it to time.
This won't work in a mogrt as there's no automatic way to pass the Premiere timecode into a essential property.
I see this as a path to achieve responsive formats as well - where one comp could automatically stretch to different aspect ratios in the host. Imagine that you could define how a mogrt should handle aspect ratios (fill, cover, stretch) and having a 'essentialHost' object with data from Premiere:
essentialHost.absoluteTime
essentialHost.time
essentialHost.width
essentialHost.height
essentialHost.aspect
essentialHost.fps (or more AE conformant properties for frame duration etc.)This would in our production situation reduce our corporate essential grapics template count to a third, as we now export every template in High, Square and Wide versions to account for at least most of the different SoMe video formats that are out here.
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Hi Kyung,
It's my understanding that time re-mapping and time expressions will not work as expected if you're using the Responsive Time functionality. The length of the track item in Premiere is not communicated back to the Tiny Inception AE™️ that lives in Premiere Pro.
My suggestion to use time expressions and controls like Evan Abrams shows in his tutorial would be used instead of Responsive Design Time. I would imagine you would need to make the Primary Comp the Max length that you think would be needed and then you would use the controls to set the durations for elements within the design. Lastly, you would cut the end of track item in the timeline if it was shorter than the Max length.
That's just a thought experiment though.
It's worth trying! -
Kyung Ko
commented
Dacia, I really appreciate your input. I'll defiantly try out both approaches.
I have a question for the time control Expression.
Is there a way to access the value how much the time is stretched in Premiere Pro? For example, does "thisComp.duration" value get affected by the custom length of the template when the out point is dragged out on the timeline? Or is there any related value I can use?If this is possible, I'm thinking of adding this kind of idea in Time Remap:
defaultDuration = 5; // Default comp duration is set to 5 second
time*(defaultDuration / thisComp.duration) -
Hi Kyung!
Happy to hear that Mogrts are working for y'all! This is an interesting puzzle you bring up 🤔. Unfortunately the Responsive Time feature does affect everything uniformly. So there is no way to exclude a layer from its powers...
But I DO have a couple of work arounds in mind!
The first is to use a Media Replacement control for the looping footage!
If you drag and drop the layer of the looping footage itself into the EGP, it will create a Media Replacement control. Any image, video, or comp layer can create this control.This will keep the footage from retiming when you change the duration of the Mogrt itself in Premiere. It essentially makes the "time container" that the footage needs to fill longer so you may need to use a longer clip so that it can "fill" the longer time of the stretched Mogrt.
This runs the risk of making your Mogrt bigger in size, so alternatively, you can just replace that media in Premiere.
You simply drag and drop your footage over the Media Replacement control in Premiere and it will swap out the footage in the Mogrt.
Double-click on the MR control in the EGP once you've added new media to bring up a hidden timeline where you can add effects, add more footage, or whatever you want.
Nothing gets re-timed with that footage unless you actively replace the media and open up that secret timeline.Here's some more info about the feature: https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/mogrtmadness
Alternatively, you can make ditch Responsive Time and make Time controls for specific elements in your project. This is a pretty good tutorial from Evan Abrams that shows you how to do this.
https://evanabrams.com/control-time-in-templates-adobe-after-effects-tutorial/Its more tedious to set up but the advantage is that it will give you more detailed control over timing of specific elements in your Mogrt instead of having one re-time hammer for the whole design.
I hope this is helpful!
Cheers,
Dacia
