Pinning an Apply Target

By default, Apply and Audition follow whatever you have selected in After Effects. Pinning breaks that link on purpose: it locks a specific property as a tab's target, so Apply and Audition from that tab keep landing there while you go on selecting and browsing elsewhere in AE.

Pinning a property

⌘⇧-click (Ctrl+Shift-click on Windows) any leaf row in the pickwhip popover. Instead of inserting a reference, it pins that property as the active tab's Apply target.

That works on a property in any composition, not just the one After Effects has open — pin straight out of a comp you're browsing in the pickwhip's Compositions list, and the pin carries that composition's identity rather than only its name, so two comps sharing a name are never mistaken for each other.

A pin belongs to a tab

Every open editor tab carries its own pin, entirely independent of every other tab's. Pin a property in one tab, switch to another, and that tab's own pin — or lack of one — is what governs Apply and Audition there.

A tab can also carry a home composition, separately from its pin: open one from a comp row's right-click Open in tab in the pickwhip, and a pickwhip opened from that tab starts in that comp. See The Pickwhip.

The amber pin chip

Once a tab is pinned, three things tell you so at once:

• The tab's title updates to name the pinned property — unless you've manually renamed that tab, which locks the title so it stops following the pin.
• The status bar shows one amber chip stating the pin's full address as a single line — comp / layer / prop — with an × to unpin. Hovering the chip (or the tab itself) shows the full sentence: "Apply is locked to <property> — <layer>, <comp>."
• The rail's Apply button turns bright amber and names the pin in its own tooltip.

Double-clicking the chip reveals the pinned property in AE's timeline — see Reveal in Timeline.

Pin-first evaluation

A pin always wins over your live AE selection — for Audition, and for the Evaluator's "Selected property" mode, not just for Apply. If the pinned property no longer exists — its layer was deleted, or the effect was removed — Audition and Apply both fail with a named error identifying the dead path. Neither one silently falls back to whatever happens to be selected in AE instead.

Durable inside shape groups

Shape layers are the case pins are built to survive: eXLib encodes the property chain by match name, sibling index, and the shape group's own display name, and re-verifies all three on every use. Two identically-named "Group 1" groups in the same layer never get confused with each other.

Cross-comp pinning

After Effects only evaluates an expression for the comp actually being rendered, so if a pin points into a comp other than the one you're currently looking at, eXLib transiently activates the pinned comp, samples the value at its own current time, and returns you to where you were. The resulting toast discloses the pin's full comp / layer / prop address, so a value that came from a brief detour into another comp is never mistaken for one that ran on what you were looking at. The viewer may briefly flash over to the pinned comp and back while this happens.

Unpinning

Click the × on the status-bar chip. If the tab's title wasn't manually locked, it reverts to its auto-numbered default.

Related

• The Pickwhip — where a pin comes from
• Reveal in Timeline — what double-clicking the pin chip actually does
• Apply — how a pin resolves at apply time
• The Live Evaluator — the other surface pin-first evaluation governs