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baking an expression to current value
I have over 300 layers of animated stroked lines in a project I’m working on with a visual artist. Each line has the following effect applied: Roughen Edges, Texturize, Displacement Map, Tint
I knew that the artist might change his mind on some of the attributes to these effects. For example “make all the reds darker” or “make the edges rougher” etc. So I used expressions to control groups of attributes. It makes changes much much quicker. BUT IT MAKES FINAL RENDERS TAKE FOREVER.
Is there anyway to turn off all expressions in a comp, but have them keep the current value and not revert to the pre-expression value?
Right now what I do is hit E-E to bring up all expressions (about 1500 instances), then I convert all to keyframes. That takes forever. And then I hit the stopwatches to delete all keyframes. It works, but it takes a while and I can’t easily turn all of the expressions back on if there needs to be a change. I’d love to be able to toggle between “expressions locked” and “expressions active”.
I got a headache just writing all that. Thanks in advance for any insight.
Kevin
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4 Replies
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WOW,
i have a very simular “problem” (well in fact, i don´t think it´s a problem… it is like it is..).BUT, if there is anybody how knows how to “fix it” / speed it up..
I´d love to hear!
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That sounds like a job for a script. The tricky part is finding all the expressions for each layer, but you probably know where they are so you wouldn’t need it to search every property in the comp. If the expressions are just linking things together and are applied to properties with no keyframes, you could have the script just set the property value to the value of the expression and disable the expression. You could use pretty much the same code to turn the expressions back on. Not too tough, but scripts can be tricky if you’ve never done one before.
Dan
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I know this is a really old thread but I am having the same issue.
Basically I have almost 200 layers connected to one controller that holds a few effects like Fill.
This increased my render times dramatically once I setup all the expressions! I just need the user to be able to pick their color scheme and then be able to ‘lock’ it in without the expressions active anymore.
Is there any way to do this? Maybe some form of batch expression to keyframe script?
Thanks
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