September 28, 2010

Sort and isolate layers in After Effects

Answering a question on ways to hide layers in groups in the After effects timeline, Todd Kopriva mentioned that Show and hide layers in the Timeline panel in AE Help had some suggestions, including Zorro-The Layer Tagger, a script from Lloyd Alvarez. Todd noted that you could also:

"add comments to layers and then use the filtering/searching in the Timeline panel to show and hide layers according to these tags."

[update: Roland Kahlenberg adds, "The Timeline has a Label Column that allows you to group your layers. You can then select a particular group with the Select Label Group option available via right-click contextual option. Then it's a matter of Shy or Hide the selected layers."]

Also, while there is no master override Solo button in the
timeline, you can also use
Zorro-The Layer Tagger turn everything on to spot check a comp quick. Zorro lets you make selection and isolation sets by adding comment tags to layers, and new for CS5 is layer color label support. Here's the demo:

1 comment:

Alan Eddie - alanedd(at sign)gmail(dot)com said...

Hi there, I wrote this script (Its sort of a simple one click isolate function for AE)
http://aescripts.com/isolate/

Thanks.
Alan Eddie.