As we mentioned earlier, we've been busy this year creating an extensive, multi-course video training series based on our popular beginner's book After Effects Apprentice. Each course has a selection of movies that are free for all to view; we're re-posting those videos here on PVC to make sure you don't miss them. This one tries to get some users over their hang-up about trying to keep all of their layers in one composition by showing how much easier it can be to accommodate client changes by strategically placing repeated elements in their own source composition.

The eighth Apprentice course focuses on Nesting and Precomposing: two different approaches to building a chain of compositions. One of the major strengths of After Effects is that you can place an entire composition into another, and have it treated as just another footage layer – with one major difference: It's still “live” meaning you can make changes to it, and those changes will ripple through automatically to the final comp without having to re-render anything. The above movie demonstrates some of the advantages of exploiting this technique. While we're at it, we throw in our usual bunch of tips and tricks, including how to use the Graph Editor to create a fun bubble-pop animation.

In the event you are new to (or uncomfortable with) the concept of building a hierarchy of compositions using nesting and precomposing, or are just curious about the course, here's the introduction/overview:

We've also shared some tips on both Nesting and Precomposing – as well as the related advanced topic of Collapsing Transformation – in our Hidden Gems series.

The content contained in After Effects Apprentice – as well as the CMG Blogs and CMG Keyframes posts on ProVideoCoalition – are copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.