• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Need advice on expressions for mass duplication/delay

  Posted by Lance Clayton on May 14, 2013 at 9:50 am

  Hey After Effects pros!

  I’m a little stuck and need some advice.

  I’m creating an animation/infographic scene of stick men and have rigged up my .ai vectors via a web of expressions which has given me maximum flexibility and control via a single NULL layer. I need them to animation on and retain the ability to spin

  It renders fast enough but it seems to be lagging out massively while trying to work on the project and I need your help to tell me:

  1. Why is AE struggling so much to handle this composition?
  2. Are the expressions what is making it struggle?
  3. What could I try or what settings could I change in order to keep everything functionally the same, but without the massive lag so that I can actually work on the scene?

  So far I’m on the most stripped back settings that I know of and it’s lagging out, and I still need two more rows of guys (i.e. 40 more layers of the .ai image!)

  My working settings are:

  – Quarter res@25%
  – Fast Draft preview
  – No motion blur

  My machine is a Late 2012 iMac 32Gb ram 1gb Video card. I can’t pre comp them into rows (reducing layers by 1/6th) because I need certain ones to change colour as in this image.

  

  Here is a link to 2 versions of the project:

  – 3 layers of guys: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10332608/Man_grid_animation_3-rows.zip
  – 4 layers of guyshttps://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10332608/Man_grid_animation_4-rows.zip (good machines only or your AE will lock up almost upon opening i.e. my problem currently)

  I’ve been using AE a while and am really starting to get into expressions so I think that I have this rigged up well but it’s simply a massive strain on my machine.

  Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated.

  Cheers

  Lance

  Lance Clayton replied 13 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Lance Clayton

  May 14, 2013 at 9:53 am

  Links failed. Sorry. Sorry copy/paste these to your browser.

  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10332608/Man_grid_animation_3-rows.zip

  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10332608/Man_grid_animation_4-rows.zip

  Download-3-rows

  Download-4-rows
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  May 14, 2013 at 4:53 pm

  I think the problem is that you have your expressions set up in a cascading fashion that the epression on one layer references the result of the same expression on the next layer, and so on. I would try changing the expressions to use an index offset from the lead layer times your spacing control to generate the layer’s unique offset. That way each expression only depends on its own calcuation and doesn’t require results from all of the other layers.

  Something like this:

  L = thisComp.layer(“ROW1-man_basic/Infographic_CareerDevelopment_elements_v4.ai 4”);
  offset = [(L.index-index)*thisComp.layer(“CNTRL_Spinning_man_DELAY_SCALE_SPACING”).effect(“Spacing”)(“Slider”),0,0];
  L.transform.position – offset;

  Dan
• 

  Lance Clayton

  May 15, 2013 at 11:11 pm

  Dan you are a true gentlemen, and a very generous one at that!

  This is exactly what I needed and it saved my project. I had never previously thought about the implications of calculating one layer’s properties off it’s preceding layer…..especially throughout 120+ layers.

  I’ve used the principles in your code to also rig up the opacity and rotation to work in a similar fashion, and my whole project is back to running like butter.

  If you’re ever in Sydney AUS, I owe you a beer!

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