• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Time remap layer start while keeping normal speed

  Posted by Alex Ezorsky on October 22, 2013 at 6:33 pm

  I want to duplicate a layer many times and have each duplicate have a start time that is 5 seconds after the previous layer.

  So basically I want the two keyframes that appear when time remapping is on, to both be advanced 5 seconds so that the speed stays the same.

  Thanks!

  Alex Ezorsky replied 12 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  October 22, 2013 at 8:57 pm

  Something like this, probably:

  valueAtTime(time – (index-1)*5)

  Dan
• 

  Alex Ezorsky

  October 24, 2013 at 6:53 am

  Ahhh! I actually figured it out. Your formula was helpful for tying the layer index to the time advancement, but really what I needed was something that was going to have each layer start at the value of the first time keyframe, and then advance linearly, regardless of the placement of the second keyframe. That way I can basically decide at what time the layer (a time remapped precomp) starts playing its internal timeline, based only on a value I enter in the first keyframe.

  And thanks to learning about “startTime”=the start time of the layer, this is the formula that worked:

  (time-startTime)+valueAtTime(startTime)

  Or of course I could just add a slider to the comp, and use this

  (time-startTime)+effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)

  The idea is that I have the same action happening to many different images, and instead of applying the keyframes to each image, I just precomp’d a series of sequenced images, then applied a looping set of keyframes to that precomp, so the action repeats, but each time there is a new image. Then the idea is that I wanted each of these images with their actions, to fly around in space. So now that the placement of each image will be something I want to manipulate manually, I merely have to precomp the looping precomp, trim this main comp to be the length of one loop and then apply the above expression and slider, and then I can duplicate that, and with each duplicate, I can decide which image its showing by merely changing the value of the slider.

  phew… you probably didn’t care to read that, but if you did it’d be cool to hear your thoughts.

  Thanks

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