[Alex Mann]

Thanks Todd,

Just this minute discovered the same thing myself. Basically writing an array and nothing else, so the expression had nothing to evaluate to. Duh 🙁

Cheers though

[Alex Mann]

Thanks for clearing that up, Derby 🙂

[Alex Mann]

Wow, Dan, that is awesome….thankyou so much!

Now I’m going and looking up what the whole nearestKey, key thing is – but that code couldn’t work better, just perfect!

I love using things like expressions and things to cut corners and speed things up, but it can really become a time sink when you know what you want to do and have a basic theory, but are just looking for the right syntax.

Many many thanks again 🙂

[Alex Mann]

Hi Angelo,

Yeah totally understand what you’re saying, it just becomes rather a tearful moment when you’ve got to pay such big bucks for a font that you’re just using for a 3-word subtitle.

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try this out.

Best wishes.

[Alex Mann]

Perfect solution 🙂 Thank you very much!

[Alex Mann]

Thanks again, Dan.

I don’t think this is going to work for me on account of the fact that thisComp.name is always going to be the same in this particular instance and if it is on a layer that is named something different the alert box throws up an error that it can’t find a layer matching thisComp.name. And, like you say, if there are multiple layers sharing the same name etc….

So in a bit of a catch 22. Will have to look for another corner cutting solution. Cheers for the very prompt help though, at least I’ve learned something new today 🙂

[Alex Mann]

Wow, thanks for the quick reply, Dan. Ok, I think I understand that alright. Is it possible then to find out what layer number of the parent(multiple parents even) composition the particular instance of MainComp from within MainComp itself by accessing it using the comp name. So if you had two instances of MainComp sitting in a structure like this…

ParentComp[layer1] .ChildComp.MainComp
ParentComp[layer2] .ChildComp.MainComp

… you could have an expression in MainComp saying time=comp(“ParentComp”).index-1 or something?

[Alex Mann]

Once again – thank very much for your help, Kevin 🙂

[Alex Mann]

Hi, sorry to have another question off the bat so soon. When you say a ‘lossless animation mov’ do you mean something specific like a Quicktime .mov or just anything that takes my fancy?

I also just came across another very strange thing when I accidentally rendered out my composition as an AVI and not a Flash from AE. The AVI looked fab, as it should at lossless setting, BUT it was 329MB in size.

The project I’m working on takes me through two steps: I screen-capture using Camtasia, save as .camrec then process and export out the .camrec as an AVI for compositing and editing in After Effects. What has me puzzled is that the last screen capture (1000 x 912, 22 seconds long) exported out as an AVI from Camtasia was just 2.59MB big. Yet the render AVI of the same screen capture sequence from After Effects at smaller dimensions and less length was a massive 329MB! What gives? :O

Thanks in advance for any help and sorry if I’m asking questions that have been answered many times, but I do usually try and search beforehand to see if anyone has similar issues.

[Alex Mann]

Wow, what a great response! No I don’t see it in a RAM preview, it’s just fine. Thank you very much for being so expansive on this issue, Kevin, I’ll get onto to trying that right away. Many thanks 🙂

Alex