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 explains an obscure bug visual anomaly that can appear when parenting one layer to another that has been scaled differently in the X and Y dimensions.

The seventh Apprentice course focuses on Parenting: A very handy way of grouping layers inside After Effects. Whereas both Parenting and Nesting (another way of grouping layers) were covered in the same chapter of the After Effects Apprentice book, for the video version we're treating it in isolation, and expanding on it by adding an anthropomorphic example from one of our earlier books.

Although parenting mostly just works the way you might expect, there is one case that may trip you up: If the parent layer is scaled differently in the X and Y dimensions, any attached children will get skewed as they rotate. In this movie, we explain what's going on underneath the hood, and then show how to work around this problem using null objects to act as a buffer between parent and child. (Indeed, null objects are very useful companions to parenting, and are discussed in both the book and the video course.)

In the event you are new to parenting, or are curious about the course, here's the introduction/overview:

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.