Script vs Keyframe: Who’s Resource Friendly

[Walter Soyka]

[Nailuj Cequeña] “Between keyframing and scripting, who’s more resource friendly. I mean, which one is the fastest in rendering and not using up more memory.”

I think you might be confusing scripting with expressions. A script is a program which targets the After Effects application; an expression is a function which Ae evaluates in the context of a single property, returning a value to that property.

Keyframes are faster to evaluate than expressions as a rule, but how much faster they are depends entirely on the complexity of the expression. Simple expressions are fast enough to not be worth worrying about. I have honestly never even considered the memory usage of expressions; I don’t think it’s significant.

I use expressions really extensively in my work, because they help me iterate designs faster. Being able to tweak a parameter or two in an expression and have it affect an entire animation saves me hours of design/development work versus tweaking loads of keyframes over the life of the project. In my opinion, it’s well-worth the very slight render time increase.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Nailuj Cequeña]

Yes, what I mean by script is expressions. Thanks for pointing that out, Walter. And thank for the explanation 🙂