• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  .duration not working

  Posted by Paul Roper on May 15, 2013 at 10:32 am

  Hello,

  I’m trying to obtain the duration of a layer, but AE refuses to co-operate. It just gives me the error “Class: ‘Layer’ has no property or method named ‘duration’. It bloody does have “duration”!

  I’ve created a text layer and put into the source text the expression:

  thing=thisComp.layer(“95253_00_02_MM30_Killed_Key_test.mov 2”);
  thing.duration

  I’ve also tried:

  thisComp.layer(“95253_00_02_MM30_Killed_Key_test.mov 2”).duration

  What is After Effects’ major malfunction?!

  If I modify the expression to:

  thing=thisComp.layer(“95253_00_02_MM30_Killed_Key_test.mov 2”);
  thing.source.duration

  …then it works…but gives me the duration of the source footage, ignoring the in/out points I’ve set on that layer. I’ve made a temporary workaround, subtracting the inpoint from the outpoint:

  thisComp.layer(“95253_00_02_MM30_Killed_Key_test.mov 2”).outPoint-thisComp.layer(“95253_00_02_MM30_Killed_Key_test.mov 2”).inPoint

  But why won’t “duration” just work?!

  – Paul

  Todd Kopriva replied 13 years ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  May 15, 2013 at 4:33 pm

  >But why won’t “duration” just work?!

  As you’ve discovered, duration wasn’t implemented as a layer attribute in the expression language. I always use some combination of inPoint, outPoint, and startTime.

  Dan
• 

  Paul Roper

  May 15, 2013 at 5:08 pm

  Thanks for the reply.

  But that’s just plain silly that we’re on version 11 (12 if you count the Controversial Cloud version) and there’s an attribute that just doesn’t work.
• 

  Todd Kopriva

  May 15, 2013 at 11:15 pm

  You can submit a bug report to make sure that something like this gets in the queue to be fixed:
  https://www.adobe.com/go/wish

  ———————————————————————————————————
  Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
  After Effects quality engineering
  After Effects team blog
  ———————————————————————————————————

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