glitch in the wiggler? (AE CS3)

[Dave Johnson]

I just happened to use the Wiggler in AE CS3 yesterday and it was fine. Are you sure you haven’t applied it to a property it can’t affect or with parameters that aren’t enough to make visible changes?

I don’t recall the specific limitations of the Wiggler well enough to give a better example, but I know there are some that are less obvious than this example. It’ll work fine if applied to a position property with parameters that change enough to make a noticeable difference, but if you apply it to the anchor point with no other adjustments, you won’t see anything happen since an anchor point moving around in itself doesn’t result in a visible change.

Or maybe your Wiggler is just wiggled out. ;~)

[Joe Mcneilly]

I’m trying to use it on position, scale and a blur effect – all of which I’ve done before, but for some reason today none of them work! When I scrub ahead to the keyframes Wiggler has created, i can see that the value of the property is unchanged. I sure hate it when things don’t work as advertised…

[Dave Johnson]

Hmmm, then I’m stumped. I just did a quick test in CS3 using all the same properties and it worked fine.

Didn’t mean to be condescending with my 101-type answer, but I’ve zoned out on things I’ve done a zillion times before enough times to know that it happens sometimes and it often just takes someone else who knows how to do what I was trying to do to thump me on the head.

Wish i could be more help … good luck!

[Joe Mcneilly]

thanks anyway, dave. sometimes it is just the basic stuff (umm, is the power on??) and a sense-check is just what you need.

i’m trying to sort it out now with expressions, but that’s not a feature i’ve used alot so its slow going. if anyone has any tips on that, i’d be grateful.

[Dave Johnson]

Indeed Joe … never met a shooter who hasn’t at least once gone frantic at a shoot because the lens cap forgot to remove itself!

I’m not versed enough in expressions to advise another, but these websites help me enormously when I venture into my less favorite aspect of AE:

https://www.motionscript.com/
(AE scripting & epressions guru, Dan Eberts, who also frequents the Cow so searching his posts may be helpful too)

https://www.crgreen.com/aescripts/

https://aenhancers.com/

[Joe Mcneilly]

Thanks, Dave. I’ll check these out! I’m looking forward to the day when technical hitches like this stop interrupting my creativity!!

[Dave Johnson]

Glad to be of some small help, Joe. One other thought … being that I can confirm that a Wiggler bug isn’t inherent in CS3, you might also try double checking that you have the latest dot release installed and/or trashing your preferences … resetting everything after trashing prefs can be a pain, but that’s why I always keep multiple incremental copies of my AE prefs and advise others to do the same.

“I’m looking forward to the day when technical hitches like this stop interrupting my creativity!!”

Aren’t we all!! … Though I’d advise against holding one’s breath on that one!

[Jeremy Allen]

Please forgive my ignorance because I’m not familiar with the differences between the Wiggler and a simple Wiggle expression, but maybe you could try that instead?

For instance, the position property. Option click on the stop watch and add wiggle(5,10). That will wiggle the position 5 times per second, a distance of 10 pixels. The simple wiggle expression doesn’t set any keyframes, which I like, but maybe that’s why you need the Wiggler. If you need to adjust the wiggle amounts over time, you could link each number in the parenthesis to an expression slider, then keyframe away.

Hope this helps. If you already know all this, just ignore me 🙂 Maybe someone else will find it useful though!

———————————————
8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.2

AE CS3

[Joe Mcneilly]

i’m just getting started with writing expressions, and have luckily have been able to get some basic wiggle action to happen, in basic properties and in the “blurriness” effect i was trying to randomize. took me a minute to sort out how noise (jagged or smooth) is expressed in the javascript. apparently more “octaves” means more “jagged.” kinda threw me off that they call it different things in different places, and don’t seem to reference the two together anywhere in the documentation. i found part of the explanation here:

https://aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=139&p=4101

[Dave Johnson]

Thanks for sharing that link, Joe. Pre-written downloadable expressions are nice sometimes since the terminology differences can make things difficult and, to me, scripting makes the creative process too much like programming.