Compositions & pre-comps
A composition is a canvas with a size, a frame rate, a duration and a background — and a stack of layers inside it. A project can hold several.
Creating one
The first composition is created on the dashboard, along with the project. You choose its size, frame rate and duration there, from a shared preset catalogue that the viewport header also uses — so the two can never disagree about what “1080p” means.
Further compositions are created and managed from the Project panel (Window → Project): create, open, rename, duplicate, delete.
There is deliberately no New Composition… item in the editor menus. One home per action is a design rule here.
Composition settings
Ctrl/⌘ + K.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | — |
| Width × Height | Any size; presets available |
| Frame rate | Also writes into the timeline controller, so the time domain stays consistent |
| Duration | Same |
| Background colour | What the composition renders on |
| Pasteboard colour | Under Environment — the surround outside the composition frame |
Pre-composing
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + C wraps the current selection into a nested composition.
Use it to:
- treat a group of layers as one thing for transform, opacity or blend purposes,
- apply an effect to the group as a whole rather than to each layer,
- reuse a chunk of animation in several places,
- get a time axis you can remap independently.
Nested rendering is real
A pre-comp’s subtree renders to its own framebuffer and composites as one unit. That is what makes group opacity, group blend modes and group effects behave correctly over nested animation, instead of applying per-layer and looking wrong wherever layers overlap.
Time remapping
Keyframe the internal time of the nested content, independently of the parent composition’s time. That gives you:
- holds — freeze the nested animation on a frame,
- reverses — run it backwards,
- speed ramps — accelerate and decelerate the nested animation.
Toggle it from the Precomp section of the Settings panel.
Keyframes are written and read on the layer-local time axis. Time remap is precisely why that distinction exists — see the time-axis rule in Keyframes.
Composition instances
Insert composition A into composition B from the Insert menu → Composition instance. The same composition can be instanced more than once, and AE-style stacking rules apply.
An instance is a reference, not a copy: change the source composition and every instance follows.
Size presets
Both the dashboard and the viewport header read one shared, grouped catalogue. Changing the composition size from the header is the same operation as choosing it at creation time.