How Altar reads your comp.
Before Altar can move anything, it has to see what you see — here is how the Bridge turns a live comp into state.
Lede
Altar never guesses at your timeline. Before it conjures a single keyframe, it reads the comp the way a craftsperson reads the grain of a board — carefully, and out loud.
The first move any Altar operation makes is a read. The Bridge walks the active composition and hands back a structured snapshot: layers, their order, properties, keyframes, expressions, the comp’s frame rate and duration. Nothing is invented.
What the snapshot holds
A Comp Snapshot is plain state. It is the comp described as data the AI can reason over — not a screenshot, not a guess.
- Every layer, in stacking order, with its enabled and locked flags
- Transform and effect properties, with their current values and keyframes
- Expressions, kept verbatim so nothing is silently rewritten
What stays yours
Reading is not deciding. Altar shows its reading back to you and waits. The composition, the timing, the taste — those stay in your hands. The Bridge just makes sure that when you describe a move, Altar is looking at the same comp you are.