OK . . .
Hacking my way through the After Effects jungle here . . . but don't understand how there's not a main timeline. I come from Flash, which has a main base timeline you throw all your animations into.
After Effects doesn't seem to have that. You just create "compositions", which are pretty much equivelent to Flash's "Movie Clips".
For complicated projects with numerous animations, are you supposed to just create all the peices as compositions, then "stack" all your peices in a master composition and render that?
Seems like there'd be a main timeline per After Effects project file. But apparently not . . .