• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Source text for displaying thisLayer.sourceRectAtTime(time).width

  Posted by Geoff Vane on October 12, 2020 at 5:02 pm

  Stupid expression problems can cause hours in delay.
  I have no means of reading variables other than putting them into a source text with an expression.

  These here work fine as a source text expression:

  thisLayer.name

  thisLayer.position or thisLayer.position[0] if you wanna go specific.

  Why doesn’t this work:

  thisLayer.sourceRectAtTime(time).width
  

  Whatever I try, I can’t get the source text to reveal this value. It just switches back to the default source text without any error.

  This seriously delays my debugging of a coding error.

  Help!

  Geoff Vane replied 5 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Geoff Vane

  October 12, 2020 at 6:17 pm

  I found the culprit: a text layer can’t examine its own size and publish that with its source text property.
  This would be something of a recursive problem.
  When I let the text layer take another layer its size, it could publish that.

  This way I found out my problem sat in another nice nasty: the update of the if-then structure.

  If-then-else is now a must.

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