• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Time Remap Expression to Slider effect not working with 2D animation

  Posted by Christoph Müller on November 13, 2014 at 6:23 pm

  Hi there,

  I am a long time reader of this forum, but never posted because I always found the answer I was looking for. Till now.

  I am doing 2D animation (just started really) and have a problem with the Time Remap Expression in two puppets I am working on (different AE projects, same problem).

  I have a pre-comp with the eye blinks that include 4 different blinks. 1 empty, 2 middle position and 1 closed. I have this comp within the ‘eye comp’, the eye comp within the ‘header comp’ and the header comp within the ‘Master Puppet comp’. I put a time remap on the ‘blink comp’ and with the following expression I connect it to a slider effect:

  comp(“Master_Puppet”).layer(“CTRL_Eye_Blink”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)/23.976

  The problem I have is that whenever I put a keyframe (normal or hold) it doesn’t match with the frame position of the blinks. If I put the first keyframe to ‘0’ and four frames after the next one to ‘4’ it doesn’t change from the open position to the closed one. It actually just does some random positions that can change from one try to another. Also most of the time the preview shows another blink than the output render does. It just does not work.

  I am looking at tutorials and it seems that I don’t do anything different than other users. Still, something I must be missing.

  I use CC2014 latest version with Mavericks 10.9.5, 16GB of RAM and a i7 iMAC from late 2013 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB.

  Any help would be appreciated.

  comp("Master_Puppet").layer("CTRL_Eye_Blink").effect("Slider Control")("Slider")/23.976

  Alan Wasem replied 7 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  November 13, 2014 at 7:07 pm

  Does your precomp layer start at some time other than zero in the main comp? If so, you probably need to do something like this (not tested, so watch for typos):

  C = comp(“Master_Puppet”);
  ctrl = C.layer(“CTRL_Eye_Blink”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
  offset = C.layer(thisComp.name).startTime;
  framesToTime(Math.round(ctrl.valueAtTime(time + offset)));

  Dan
• 

  Christoph Müller

  November 13, 2014 at 7:16 pm

  Hi Dan,

  thanks for your answer, but no, my comp and my pre-comp start both on ‘0’. Also, it seems more to be a glitch of the caching system. Or probably a combination between time remap and the caching system. I can clean all memory and cache and it turns to another combination then before. Also, hold keyframes are not respected. They suddenly change the blink to another frame. Very weird.

  I just found this other thread and it seems the same problem, but on CS6. Is it possible that this never was addressed by Adobe?

  https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1042375

  Edit:

  I just found two solutions to this problem:

  1. Render your pre-comp out and import the MOV-file again. If you have your mouth shapes or blinks as a video file the problem does not happen.

  2. In your pre-comp open the composition settings with cmd+k (on a Mac) or ctrl+k (I suppose on windows) and open the advance tab. Select ‘Preserve Frame Rate when Nested‘. Then purge All Memory & Disk Cache (from the Edit/Purge option in the menu). This even works with several layers from PS or AI or what ever you have done to your pre-comp.

  I really don’t know why, but both options have worked for me. Hopefully it works for someone else too.
• 

  Alan Wasem

  August 7, 2018 at 8:56 pm

  thank you! changing comp settings to preserve frame rate and then empty cache worked for me!

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