Mini-Flowchart View

Mini-Flowchart View

The Timeline is great for timing, but the bane of the Timeline
is precomping. There are many times where there
is no way around sending a set of layers into their own
Timeline, yet most artists will do anything to avoid this step
because it locks those layers and controls out of the main
Timeline. In the past, precomping also made it harder simply
to fi nd where everything was; it is standard for an After
Effects artist working on a complex comp to be left with
the “where did I do that” feeling at one time or another.
That’s now less the case, thanks to CS4’s Mini-Flowchart, or
Minifl ow. You can access it via a button in the Timeline ,
but you may have already discovered that simply tapping
the Shift key with the Timeline forward enables it.
By default, the comp order is shown fl owing right to left.
The reason for this is probably that if you open subcomps
from a master comp, the tabs open to the right; however,
a convincing argument can and has been made to choose
Flow Left to Right in the panel menu of the Mini Flowchart.
Try it and see if you breathe a little sigh of relief.
Either direction, Minifl ow is the best workfl ow addition
to After Effects CS4. It shows only the nearest neighbor
comps  but click on the fl ow arrows at either
end and you navigate up or down one level in the hierarchy.
Click on any arrows or items in between the ends and
that level is brought forward.

Minifl ow does not display the entire compositing tree like
Flowchart view does, but it’s much more useful. The most
complicated it gets is in multiple one-to-many relationships,
because you can only trace your way down one fl ow
at a time, but that turns out not to be such a big deal. It’s
much simpler to open a comp and see where it’s used than
the previously existing alternatives.