After Effect’s Fill effect is a very useful effect. If you have never used you probably should look into it. It’s the simplest effect. It just applies a color onto a layer. Basic stuff.

The weird thing with this effect is that its opacity property acts the same as with the Transform effect. It just bypasses the layer’s opacity. I’ve thought long and hard about why the After Effects team could’ve made that decision and never got to any conclusion. This feels like a bug that was called a feature but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.

CC Composite is the solution

Now, there is a somewhat simple, yet not evident, way to fix this. The magic of CC Composite, a lesser-known effect that allows to composite your initial layer in your layer’s effects stack.

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The typical wiggle expression in After Effects is this:

wiggle(frequency, amplitude)

So if you would like your position to move on a scale of 20 pixels every half second you would use this expression on the position property:

wiggle(.5, 20)

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You will often find yourself toggling the visibility of layers in After Effects. This can get really cumbersome and hazardous to click all those little eye icons in deeply nested compositions. Having a controller layer on top of everything with some checkbox expressions can really help organizing everything out.

Select the layer you’d want to toggle and add this expression in its opacity property.

(comp("the-comp-name").layer("the-layer-name").effect("the-checkbox-effect")("Checkbox") == 1 ? value : 0)

This layer will then show when the checkbox is checked. To invert the effect, just invert the value and the 0.

Heads up!

Most layers, when hidden, will not add time to renders and RAM Previews although sometimes, mostly when the hidden layer has expressions, it will still be processed when rendering.

Modifying shortcuts in After Effects is a surprisingly tedious and unintuitive task. There is no way to do it from within our interface as in Premiere Pro (Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts) or Cinema 4D (Window/Layout > Command Manager).

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