[Andy Engelkemier]

Ha! Not only did I not find a solution, but I had forgotten about it long enough that I did a search for this issue and found my own question.

If you are using time remap, it feels very random which keys will work and which won’t. It really feels buggy. In one case, if I set a key on an opacity value then it didn’t work. With no keys, I could set the value.
My workaround in that case, that doesn’t always work, was to use an expression for that value that just looked at the opacity value of an adjustment layer. That worked, and setting keys on the adjustment layer Also worked.

I’m pretty sure this particular issue happened within the latest release. I believe they keys here were working, did an update, and then they weren’t. That’re really difficult to know for sure though.

Oddly, I have another layer in the same composition, Also just attached to layer opacity. That one was still accepting keys while using time remap.

I tried the expression workaround elsewhere and it didn’t work. My thought process there was that when you add a key, it attempts to add a key value inside the composition you are referencing. With time remap active, maybe that wouldn’t produce proper results. So I figured if I add an expression, it should just take the current frame and set the value to the layer I’m pointing to. Then next frame, repeat, and it shouldn’t matter if I have time remap active. It worked in one instance, and didn’t in another.

So good luck I guess, but hopefully you have better luck. Some of these things definitely are buggy though. I had one case where I exported a mogrt to use in premiere and I was using an expression to change the font style to all caps. It worked in premiere, but decided to make just a small handful of letters not work when rendered out with media encoder. You just never know what you’re going to get.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I know where all of the footage is located. It’s actually located in the location that it last was. But my coworker selected to offline them for some reason.

I was just wondering if there was a way to tell Premiere, “Hey, I have all my footage now. So just go ahead and look again.”

Many of the pieces of footage are in their own folders, so premiere wasn’t finding them automatically. It only does that for files in the same folder location. So I was still having to manually find a bunch.

I’ve found that when you open something, if you choose cancel when it tells you a bunch is missing, you can still save and when you go to open it again it gives you the same message if it hasn’t been found. But once you choose offline, you have to manually go back and find it all.

Well one downside there is I played some tricks on windows to make it think a shortcut path is the actual path. It sounds silly, so I’ll explain. OneDrive always puts the path with your username in it. So if you share a project, the path is always unique for a shared project. So I created a folder on both of our computers that links to the OneDrive location. And it actually Works with premiere…..up until you have to use the windows file path to find a file. So long as it is the media browser, it works. But when you use windows file path, it automatically changes the path.

So this whole, “finding” files breaks things.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Thanks. I figured I’d have to calculate the sizes based on the source width and height, but also calculating for scale.

I chose to use the rectangle dimensions directly, rather than sourceRectAtTime because I thought that would be faster to calculate (but I have no idea and I’ve found testing to be pretty inconsistent) and all of my footage is 16:9 so same, I checked against 1.77778 rather than dividing again. I’m sure it’s minuscule, but seemed like it should be faster.

I wanted to also be able to scale with the transform effect on top of the existing scale.

I ended up skipping that aspect, just because I needed to move on.

I think the way to do it, since I wanted 2 scales, would be to add 3 sliders for X, Y, and scale. and handle the expressions all within the main scale expression and transform position. That way the position expression only has to look at the final scale, like you’ve done.

And yes, I thought about the anchor point in the same way you did, so wrote an expression to ensure it was centered even if I tried to move it. With the 150 videos (not stills), and me trying to save some hard drive space so they are H.264, it looks like render time will be around 30-40seconds per frame. Not ideal, but I don’t know much about optimization for this. I’d probably spend more time on the larger ProRes downloads, and possibly rerendering them at 720 instead of 1080 than just waiting for it to render when I go to export.

One thing I found to be really odd was I have a checkbox for mirroring X optionally, which just has an if statement to multiply the X value by -1 if the checkbox is checked. I noticed the render time was faster if the box was checked. I though, “oh, maybe it’s because when it evaluates the if statement it gets to skip the else?” So I switched the statement around. But that didn’t do it. The frame render time was still significantly different if the scale ended up being multiplied by -1. And it’s things like this that make me Not want to learn much about optimization. I also noticed that if I hit page up to go to the next frame, currently my frames are taking about 3.5 seconds. But if I hit space or Num0, the frames take 8.7seconds. I’m guessing it has something to do with multiframe rendering, and this being a case where that makes it worse?

Anyway, I appreciate the help. Once I’m finished I’ll probably go back and write it out using your method, but adding the extra scale option. But for now, I needed to just get the footage all in there. Finding 151 pieces of unique footage, downloading them, and replacing the image footage…..it takes a while.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I know this is really old, but I found it by doing something really similar and came up with results that I think are better. And order matters of course.

Posterize is likely what you want, but not by itself. You’ll need to limit the colors to probably 8 values of R, G and B. So precomp your layer and duplicate it 3 times. Make each layer only show Red, Green, and Blue. I used levels(individual controls) because that’s what I thought of first, but there are several solutions there and I’m not sure which is the fastest. Be sure that you are limiting the at both the beginning And the end (just before the last posterize 8) of the stack just in case you added some colors in some effects in the middle. Change the top two layers to add mode. Your image should look like it did before.

Now add posterize to each layer and change the value to 8. Yeah, that doesn’t look super great. So now for the dithering! Add noise above the posterize on each layer. Probably around 1%.

I’ve found better dithering results by sequentially adding those. So maybe start by adding posterize 200, noise, posterize 128, noise, posterize 64, noise, posterize 32, noise, then Finally your posterize 8. You can also experiment with checking color noise on some/all of the noise. You’re only using one channel for each layer so using color noise is going to just make the noise values a bit more subtle.

And if you want to change the visual resolution add an adjustment layer and add mosaic to it and adjust to whatever resolution you’re after.

This technique also appears to work well for getting rid of banding when your adjustments cause banding in 8bit color, which is what most every video output is going to be, and even if you’re using 10/12bit the majority of people viewing it will end up on an 8bit viewer of some sort.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Thanks for the tip. I do both, depending on what is needed. If you use essential graphics to push a setting, that setting is different for each instance.

Maybe a good example is color. I know I’m supposed to use purple for a color, but I’ve seen 5 different versions of it. Clearly the graphics team hasn’t chosen it yet. So I’ll add a color effect to an adjustment layer in my main timeline, next to a few other things like a checkbox for turning off effects that take a crazy long time to render, and whatever else I think I might need to change on multiple layers. At the end, I’ve got maybe 40 layers that use that purple color. I tie them all to that purple color. So then I just change the one color, and I’m done.

If I do that through essential graphics, I have to set up the color in essential graphics, Then add another expression to link that color to the master color. Useful in some cases, but in that example, unless I’ll be using the same precomp elsewhere with a unique color, then I’m better of linking that color to my main comp, right?

Pickwhip isn’t the biggest problem with precomps. The bigger issue I’ll run into is time. You can’t link the comp settings from one to another can you? So if I precomp, then later I change the length of my master comp because someone added a 5 second segment somewhere, now the precomp, which used to be the length of my comp, is now 5 seconds short. (one reason I’d love to edit precomps from within the other comp)

I do use nested comps frequently. But more often, paired with essential graphics needs, or for some shorter thing that’s only a few seconds long. Also, editing text in essential graphics in AE is so dumb. Why don’t we get an interface like Premiere!? I have to drop down the menu, right click on the item, and edit value? First off, Not intuitive at all. But also, if it’s the text of a text box you don’t get to see the line breaks until you’re done. I know you don’t work for Adobe. Just ranting because Adobe sucks So often. I think I find a unique reason Adobe sucks about 3 times a week. And for the people that say “you should tell them what to fix by using uservoice” I would point you to 2+ year old Bugs that have yet to even be acknowledged. I’ve even pointed out bugs before that they’ve fixed, then later broke again. It’s just not worth it. Remember the days when companies used to Give you the software to be a beta tester? Now, they don’t even fix things unless enough people Vote on it.

[Andy Engelkemier]

That’s a real bummer. I just ended up precomping both, but sometimes doing that is a huge pain in the butt, if you’ve got a lot of expressions going because then you have to update them all to point to a different composition.
I would precomp a Whole lot more if they just let you show the contents in place as well, making it much easier to understand time differences, easier pickwhips, etc.

Thanks for letting me know, even though it’s sad news.

[Andy Engelkemier]

One big advantage of using an expression is that the fonts Stay linked to your “parent” layer. And you don’t have to explicitly call out the text if you do it like this:

f = thisComp.layer(“MainText”);

fFont = f.text.sourceText.style;

fFont;

I’ve split it up so that you just point “f” to your parent layer with pick whip, but you can do it all in one line of text really. I just like doing it like that so it’s easier to understand. It could just look like:
thisComp.layer(“MainText”).text.sourceText.style;

That’s it. That’s the only line you need. Just put that in the source text for each of your layers and the whole style will match. If the style changes over time then you’ll want to use an expression more like Walter suggests where you use getStyleAt. But you don’t have to call up the sourceText. You just have to apply the style to it. You can also call up specific styles to use like style.font(“fontName”) which will only do the font. Then you can control size, kerning, etc separately using those attributes. That’s handy if you want to do something like make the size always relative to another layer but use the same font.

[Andy Engelkemier]

My guess is icc profiles are different for both of you. That’s a windows setting, but could also be the View>Use Display color management settings are different.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/color-management.html

[Andy Engelkemier]

Yeah, that parent business what a huge pain in my butt. I realized, after Basically finishing something, that what I had designed would have worked much better with a few child-parent relationships.

I haven’t come across it yet. Does AE let us do something like: thisLayer == child ? parent info : nonParented value;

I obviously wouldn’t do that shorthand, but just wanted to get the idea across. I’d Like to create a bunch of code snippets somewhere that I can reuse, and accounting for those things could definitely help, especially if a coworker uses a snippet for something they are working on.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Yeah, that’s basically the same as what I am doing as well. I was wondering if you could do it with essential graphics. I can maybe think of one way, but it would only work for transitioning two precomp layers. That would work for premiere, if you’re moving it over there, but I’m keeping things all here, and I try not to precomp when I don’t need to because it just complicates a lot of fast/simple tasks. There are Definitely times I have to, and times I choose to, but it soothes my mind to see everything at once.