[Andrew Jehan]

This almost gets me there, but I’m trying to simply get the number for the current shape group and I’m a bit confused.

When I pickwhip the relevant properties, it shows up as:

content(“Group 1”).transform.position
content(“Group 2”).transform.position
etc.

I just want to use a single expression that can be applied to all the groups, which therefore needs to reference the current group number.

I’ve tried copying in the expression from the solution above like so:

content(“Group” + (parseInt(thisProperty.propertyGroup(3).name.split(” “)[1],10))).transform.position

But I get a “syntax error”. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong? Thanks!

[Andrew Jehan]

Then you must not be using layers. To get layers and editable text together you need to export in CMYK mode.

[Andrew Jehan]

No, but that’s just it. If you export to PSD in RGB mode, the editable text option is greyed out / not available.

[Andrew Jehan]

Your little P.S. saved me! What a crazy process!

Step 1: Export Illustrator graphic as a CMYK Photoshop file.

Step 2: Open the file in Photoshop and convert it to RGB and save it again.

Step 3: Open the Photoshop file as a composition in After Effects.

Step 4: Create editable text from text layers.

The instructions elsewhere were always missing that CMYK/RGB info, and the copy-pasting wasn’t working for me. Thanks so much!

[Andrew Jehan]

I know this is an old post, but it’s the first thing that comes up on Google when you ask this question. So, here’s the solution that worked for me:

There is a “stray anchor point” under one of the actual anchor points you’re trying to join together. (When you scissor a line, and delete the unwanted line segment, it leaves two stray anchor points.)

To fix this, you can deselect everything, then click “Select > Object > Stray Anchor Points”. Then hit delete to get rid of them. Hopefully when you try joining your lines, you will only have the two intended anchor points selected, and you won’t get the error message.

[Andrew Jehan]

There are certain situations in which none of the options suggested here will help.

The pick-whip method sounds promising for my situation (I want many instances of an effect that employs a random seed so an adjustment layer won’t work). Aside from the fact that there are about 50 properties (when I twirl down all the sub-categories of properties) that I have to pick-whip one-by-one, there are certain properties of the effect that can’t be pick-whipped at all.

Here’s a screen shot. I can’t pick-whip properties such as “trigger mode”, “enable block damage/shift/shake/flicker” (oddly since other checkbox properties CAN be pick-whipped).

There seems to be no solution here.

[Andrew Jehan]

Thanks for your response, but I don’t understand your suggestion. Can you elaborate or give an example?

Thanks again!

[Andrew Jehan]

For people reading this thread in the future, I figured it out. Apparently having the ‘collapse transformations‘ switch on stops the motion blur from working. If you need collapse transformations on, then you need to use ‘force motion blur‘.

[Andrew Jehan]

I’m having this problem right now. I know about “force motion blur”, but I’d like to figure out what’s causing this issue. It’s a very fast position transform on a precomposed text layer, see screenshot.

[Andrew Jehan]

I’m on a 27″ iMac 5K running Sierra. I set AE to do a 6-hour-ish render yesterday, and this morning, 15 hours later, it had not finished. It seems that the computer went to sleep, because the render continued quickly when I woke the computer up this morning. But I can’t figure out why it went to sleep.

I couldn’t find the setting “Computer Sleep” so that I could set it to “Never”. Here are my settings: