I find expressions really annoying to deal with when writing After Effects scripts.

That’s why I made Expressify – an open source tool that compiles After Effects Expressions into formatted JavaScript strings automatically.

Learn more here.

Thanks for the response, Yoan!

I actually tried this exact same thing and it still doesn’t work properly. There are no mismatch errors, but unfortunately it still treats each tiny change during onChanging as its own event.

I’m creating a Script UI with a slider. While the user is changing the slider, a temporary shape layer is created in order to preview the effect. When they let go, the temporary layer is removed and the effect is applied.

slider1.onChanging = function() {
    // this will get fired 100+ times
    // create shape layer to preview (adjust outPoint on…

Read more

Point and Paragraph text spit out different top & left sourceRectAtTime values. Does anyone know how to account for this difference? Or essentially how to get to the point text values using the paragraph text data?

I’m having a hard time writing expression selector expressions as there doesn’t seem to be much documentation out there.

If it is possible, how could I target on characters by their index that have changed in the last frame. And I want to combine this with a linear function to change the influence so that if they have changed 1 frame ago = 100……

Read more

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

What would be the best way to .split() text to include spaces, while excluding line breaks from the result?

I’m guessing there’s a way use .split(/s/) and then add the spaces later, but I’m stumped.

I figured as much, but thanks for the conformation!

Working on a script that involves text properties (tracking, leading, horizontal scaling, etc)

Here is a snippet of my code:

    var src = layer.property("ADBE Text Properties").property("ADBE Text Document");
    var srcText = src.value;
    srcText.horizontalScale = 0.0001;
    src.setValue(srcText);

This works fine except it resets all of the style…

Read more

I thought I tried that, but I must have had a typo somewhere…works perfect! Thanks again.

How could I replace the hard-coded line break with a variable?

v = "r";

And is there a good reference/directory for this type of syntax (i.e. “‘$&r'”)?

Brilliant! Thank you, Dan 🙏

As part of a larger expression, I need to inject line breaks after each character in a string. I have something that works (hacked together from another post here), but was wondering if there is a more efficient method, since I’ll need to be doing this to multiple strings at once.

idx = 0;
outStr = "";
while (idx < value.length){
	if (idx > 0) outStr…

Read more

Perfect, thank you!

I’m working on an expression to determine the type (lowercase, uppercase, number, symbol) of the last character in a string.

Right now I’m doing something like this

par = parent.text.sourceText;
src = par.charAt(par.length-1);
lib = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x",…

Read more

The emojis from Twitter are vector based and open source: https://twemoji.twitter.com/

We used these to build EmojiKit (After Effects script): https://aescripts.com/emojikit/

Ah yes, I meant pingpong. Perfect! Thank you, Dan.

FYI, I had to change key(1).time to key(1).value

Yes, this works great! Any way of getting this to boomerang ( i.e. loopOut(“boomerang”) ) without it using the loopOut function?

Yes, this works great! Any way of getting this to boomerang ( i.e. loopOut(“boomerang”) ) without it using the loopOut function?

Trying to work out an expression that will loopOut() Time Remap keyframes starting at a marker.

startMarkerTime = thisLayer.marker.key(1).time;

I can get the animation to start at the marker, but not loop:

if (time <= startMarkerTime) {
    0	
} else {
    time - startMarkerTime
}

Or I can get the loop to start at the marker, but not from the first…

Read more

Working on an expression that is controlled by the value of an Int. I’d like to take the Int and interpolate or ease the value upon change for set amount of frame.

For example

Value at 0:00 = 1;

Value at 3:00 = 2;

Let’s assume 30fps comp and I want the interpolation last 10 frames. Is there an expression that could make it so:

Value… Read more