Does a “layer time index” exist?

[Dan Ebberts]

Not easily. You’d need to write a loop that checked each layer’s in point and sorted the results. What are you trying to do? There may be a better way to do it.

Dan

[Simon Björk]

Hi Dan,

I’m in this aswell. We’re trying to move each layer in the timeline back 50 frames. Except the first layer that appear in the timeline, that I only want to move 25 frames back. I thought I could find somehow what the first layer was by some kind of “time index”. Any ideas?

[Dan Ebberts]

It sounds like you need a simple script that will make two passes through the comp’s layer stack, the first time looking for (and moving) the layer with the earliest in point, and a second time to move all the other layers.

This would be pretty easy to do manually, so I assume you must have a bunch of these to do, is that correct?

Dan

[Simon Björk]

Yeah, it can be a lot of layers and will take a lot of time to do manually. I have made a script that moves each layer 50 frames back. I guess I would loop through the time of each layer to find out which one that starts first so I can move that only 25 frames. Any idea how this would be done? My scripting skills are still pretty poor…

[Dan Ebberts]

Something like this:


{
var myComp = app.project.activeItem;
var myIdx;
var myLayer;
var myMin = 999999;

// find layer with earliest in point

for (var i = 1; i <= myComp.numLayers; i++){
if (myComp.layer(i).inPoint < myMin){
myMin = myComp.layer(i).inPoint;
myIdx = i;
}
}

// myIdx now has the layer index of the layer with the earliest in point

// now move all layers

for (var i = 1; i <= myComp.numLayers; i++){
myLayer = myComp.layer(i);
if (i == myIdx){
myLayer.startTime -= myComp.frameDuration*25;
}else{
myLayer.startTime -= myComp.frameDuration*50;
}
}
}


Dan