Bake expressions of a specific property for all layers inside selected comps

[Miguel De mendoza]

There are some erros on your code.
First of all,using a try/catch statement to check if a layer have a property is not the best way:
// If the layer has the property, invoke the function with the property as input
try{//wrong
myProperty = myLayer.property("sourceText");
convertToKeyframes(myProperty);
}catch(err){
}

You must do it by a if/else statement, and in your case, what you need to check is if the current layer is a TextLayer object, because all text layers must have a sourceText property.

Second you are trying to access sourceText property on a wrong way. You must access it using full property spec, and it’s better to use the matchName instead of the name:

if(myLayer instanceof TextLayer){
myProperty = myLayer.property(" ADBE Text Properties").property("ADBE Text Document");
//Do stuff
}

Other thing I can see is if you want to do this for multiple comps you must encapsulate your code on a function with the current comp as parameter, and then iterate throug the comps:

function bakeExpressions(curComp){
// Check if something is selected and if selection it is a Composition...
//...
}
selection = app.project.selection;

for(var curComp in selection){
bakeExpressions(curComp);
}

[Gabriele Bartoli]

Thanks for taking the time to look at the code. Hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to focus on the third point, which is the most important to me. I’m on a deadline and I’d like to focus on that for now. The rest of the code is exactly what Dan Ebberts wrote and it works, so I’ll leave it as is for the time being.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Thanks again.

[Gabriele Bartoli]

Hi.

I finally got the code to do what I needed it to be (which was slightly different from baking the expression for the whole length of the layer), and I thought I’d share it. Let me know what you think!

/*
Freeze expression at inPoint

This script goes through the layers of the comps selected in the project panel and identifies all Text Layers.
If the Source Text property is being evaluated via expression, a keyframe is created at inPoint for the expression-driven value.
After creating such keyframe, the expression is disabled.

This can be useful to save a lot of rendertime if the expression is not used to change the value across time but only to get
it from another source (.txt file, comp name, another text layer).
*/

{
function manipulateTextLayers(comp){
var totLayers = comp.numLayers; // Store the length of the input argument 'comp'

for (j = 1; j <= totLayers; j++){
var myLayer = comp.layer(j); // Store the layer object in a var

// Check if the layer is a Text layer, then proceed
if(myLayer instanceof TextLayer){
var myProperty = myLayer.property("sourceText"); // Store property of interest in var

// Check an expression is currently applied
if (myProperty.expressionEnabled){
var inPoint = myLayer.inPoint; // Store the inPoint time for the layer in var
var valAtInPoint = myProperty.valueAtTime(inPoint, false); // Store the value of the property at inPoint
// NOTE: Using 'false' as the second argument, any applied expression is NOT ignored

myProperty.setValueAtTime(inPoint, valAtInPoint); // Create a keyframe inPoint with the expression-driven value
myProperty.expressionEnabled = false; // Disable the expression
}
}
}
}

app.beginUndoGroup("Freeze expressions at inPoint"); // Set the undo group

// $.write("\n=============\n"); // Debug line of text

// Store the selection. The selection attribute returns an array
var selection = app.project.selection;

// Run through the selected items and invoke function only for comps
for (i = 0;i < selection.length; i++){
if ( selection[i] instanceof CompItem){
$.write(selection[i].name + "\n"); // Debug

// Invoke function
manipulateTextLayers(selection[i]);
}else{
$.write(selection[i].name + " is selected but not a comp!\n");
}
}

}