From Storyboards to Animatics
By Brian J. Immel
Under construction!
Nesting
Placing a comp within another comp is called nesting. Like putting several (but not all) of your eggs in one basket. You can have as many comps nested within one another as you like. This sets up a hierarchical structure. Whenever we change one of the children comps (the nested ones), they will automatically update in the parent comp. Example: Lets say we have comp01 nested inside comp_master along with comp02 and comp03. We edit comp01 to have a different color scheme, add a time code to comp02 and change the length of comp03. All the changes will appear in comp_master automatically except for comp03. Whenever we change the length of a nested comp, we’ll need to adjust the comps around it or the length of the nested comp (longer or shorter).
The master comp
Used for the file comp that you will output every other comp you set up for the entire animatic. Sometimes there will be several ‘master’ comps. In this case, you should create each master as a ‘scene comp’ with several nested comps. Keep in mind what constitutes a scene. Once you have all your scene comps created, put all the scene comps into the master comp and prepare it for rendering.
Comp sizes: larger vs. smaller
If some cases, you may want a larger comp to be nested inside a smaller one later on (zooms and pans to name a few examples).
Pre-rendering comps
Depending on how complex your animatic gets, you may want to pre-render some comps (especially those with fades or some sort of special effect). This will save you render time in the long run but will cost you more hard disk space because each pre-rendered movie requires space in addition to the final rendered animatic.
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