• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Time stretch data / Layer end time via expressions ?

  Posted by Andreas Feix on September 15, 2009 at 9:21 am

  Hi,
  I’m currently looking for a way to receive the ending time of a layer inside a composition, f.ex. as a numerical time value.

  However, the problem is that it’ll have to give me the end time of the layer, regardless of any clipping of the back portion, which renders the outPoint property useless.
  So basically I’m looking for the counterpart to the “startTime” as the “inPoint” counterparts the “outPoint”.

  Extracting the ending time from the “startTime” & the footage’s duration won’t work either since I’d need the ending time after time stretch’s applied…

  The other thing I’m looking for as an alternative is that I’d need to extract the information of time stretching of a layer. Either by getting the time stretch factor or the frame duration after the stretch’s applied – Time remap won’t work as such either since I’m dealing with time stretch information from layers directly imported from Premiere.

  — —
  The main reason I’m looking for a way to receive the ending time of a layer is this:

  At the company where I’m working at, our supervisor likes to edit the commercial work within adobe premiere & import it into after effects for further processing (colour correction, compositing etc.), importing all the time stretching etc. done inside the edit (he just likes to use ’em).
  Since he doesn’t usually care about doing such additional stuff which would take more than 1 click (some ppl never change :P), I’m trying to offer a simple solution to display data such as a shot’s name, current frame (via timecode) etc. atuomatically, using a few simple text layers & expressions.
  This can prove to be quite valuable information for the other vfx department members, since it can occasionally happen that they waste time tracking down certain shots and the frame range they’ll need to take care of.

  So far I mastered most of the difficulties, but now I’ve encountered the problematics of displaying the correct source frame data of a layer after the time stretch’s applied, so that the vfx guys know which frame range of they source material they’re dealing with.

  All I’d like to know is if there’s an easy solution to my dilemma since presenting the supervisor with an automated solution is always better, rather than convincing him the hard way to give up the time stretch & use other methods.

  Thanks already in advance for any support which you can provide me with.
  Regards,
  Andreas

  Eclipse FX
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  https://www.eclipse-fx.net
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  YouTube keyword: eclipsefx

  Andreas Feix replied 16 years, 7 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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