[Andy Engelkemier]

Ha, believe me. If Adobe changed the way things get previewed and played in AE so it was comparably as fast as Premiere, I’d never leave AE. There is Very little I like about Premiere. But stringing together a bunch of videos, premiere is much faster.

I still don’t get why Both applications can’t just crunch away at things in the background All of the time for really good previews. Like, if you’re just doing some color grading on something, it’s not using 100% of your GPU or processor. Why not start rendering the preview for that title I made 4 minutes ago so that when I end up playing there again it’s ready to go?

If they manage to get that, and have the real-timiness of premiere in AE? Well that would just be super duper neat.

And yes, I ended up doing that clip in AE. Not with dynamic link though. I have had too many issues with final renders when I do that. Like, media encoder just gets stuck at some point. So I ended up just deciding to not use it. I guess it’s been a while though, and perhaps I can give it some more tries.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Working in a team, with some of the people involved Barely understanding that they should only use CMYK if the printer requests it, then frequently forgetting and giving me CMYK files anyway, it’s difficult to get them to not move around layers.

Also the point here is the save time. Doing that takes quite a bit of extra work.

Of course, these days, I offset a lot of that by using the Overloard plugin. That is SUCH a time saver and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s not for every project, for sure, but you should definitely check it out.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Wouldn’t it be simpler to create extra objects to accomplish this? Null1 is the LocRotScale of the track. Null2 is has another set. An expression would tell a 3rd object how much influence Null1 vs Null2 there would be.
This is actually what I’m looking for right now. I know things like it exist as plugins being related to IK, but I’m looking for something more simple than that.
Rather than splitting a bunch of layers and reparenting the second group, I’d like to just parent them all to a null that switches parent influence. it s so many less layers. lol

This is common for IK animation. Putting a hand on an object while a character moves, or throwing and catching a ball from one hand to another are both classic examples of parent influence. The ball has to be parented to Both hands, but you animate the influence. In that case, you would have the influence on/off, rather than animating it though. But you get the idea.

[Andy Engelkemier]

When you copy and paste, it keeps the format of the source.
So I wonder if it is possible to have two different layers with the two fonts. Then on a third layer match the source of layer 1, the character two match source of layer 2.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Because I wanted to do it with expressions. I have already done the animation, but keyed it all manually. And my text object is two different fonts.
I just wanted to see if I could automate this a bit more so next time, when they choose different values and fonts, I could be more efficient and spend more time on other parts of the animation that are more interesting.
I know we are all getting anxious, but there is no reason to yell.

In my experience, every time the first few people respond with “you can’t” they are wrong. Because someone like Dan Eberts comes along and responds with exactly how to do it.
I think I also misunderstood your intention. We’re you trying to say that fonts are inaccessible to expressions on a per character basis? You didn’t specify, so it looked like you just didn’t know what you were talking about. My apologies if you were just being unclear.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Well check again. Because you can. And it’s been at least a year since you could.

[Andy Engelkemier]

so I’m not great at math, which makes me not great at writing expressions. I get lost at the valueAtTime part. You know, the part that says what actually happens.

I’m not sure about the %. I don’t really understand how to practically apply what modulo is.

That being said. It works, but i need it to stop looping at the End of the loop. My loop is intentionally abrupt, so the beginning and end are opposite. I want to just say else value at key(2) (there are 3 keys) but not sure if that’s possible.

[Andy Engelkemier]

So I finished the project, Luckily. But not without issue.
I deleted cache for All projects, and it rebuilt on open, as it should. And it seemed fine for a quick minute. Then it reverted back to half the resources being unusable for editing. They don’t play correctly in the source window, but on export, it’s fine.
I edited, crossed my fingers that rate changing would work out fine in the end, and it was fine. I was just making a 15 second version of our “demo reel” for linkedIn. So at least it’s not for a client.

I’d Love to figure out why the heck this is happening though. I’ve never had things be messed up so much in the Source window, but also render out fine on export.

[Andy Engelkemier]

cameras for 2D layers are…..a bit “different” because you don’t use them. I mean, you Could just take your entire 2D composition and turn it into a 3D layer in a new comp. Then animate a camera around. That’s one way. But cameras are cumbersome, this would render slower, and add unnecessary complexity.

Instead. You use Professor Farnsworth’s method of space travel. Since he couldn’t move the space ship fast enough, he just moved the entire universe in the opposite direction.

So just like what you’re looking at there, the entire animation is done on a “sheet of paper” as they reveal in the end. You’re just moving that sheet of paper around in front of your viewport.

You can precomp, and do all your “camera moves” in the final composition. The annoyance here is you have to go back and forth since framing your animation is done in a different comp. Or you can parent things to nulls. The annoyance there is every time you parent, if you need an expression, you’re going to have to get world position rather than the object position. Not a big deal, but definitely annoying.

They are using wiggle, too heavily in my opinion. But I think the overall motion, they’re just animating by hand.

[Andy Engelkemier]

HAHAHA, OMG. Yeah, thank you for sticking with me.
Shoot, I Rarely hit the `/~ key with my mouse over that menu, so never thought to do that. The only time I do that is to check the File Path maybe. The label was too far over, so I didn’t have access.

And thank you for including how to show that label column, in case someone else comes looking for this.

I can now color code my timeline comps! Thanks.

It Would be nice to be able to do that right in the comp tab. But that’s just a UX issue.

Thanks so much Walter. You did say project window, and for some reason I call that my bin. Must be legacy from some other software that I used in the early 2ks or something.