[Brendon Murphy]

You could always drop the comp into a new comp. Draw a mask around the area you want to keep, and then export in a format that supports alpha (like tiff, png, or exr)

[Brendon Murphy]

No. You would need to replace the checkbox variable with your slider. Even then, there are an infinite number of values between 0 and 1. Unless you manually type 0 or 1 into the slider every time, everything between will throw an error. Not to mention you’ll still have a fade unless you have two keyframes right beside each other. This is why checkboxes exist!

[Brendon Murphy]

Instead of trying to change the start time right away, you could add the wave files to an array and then assign the start time based on the array index (0,1,2) when you add them to the comp. OR, add all three items to the top of the comp without changing the start time. Then change the start time of the first three layers in the comp using layer indexes 0,1, and 2.

[Brendon Murphy]

For sliders, I would personally use 100 instead of 1 since the slider will always show 100, even if you put 1 as your clamp max.

BUT, the checkbox is still the ideal solution – a single checkbox can control both eye shapes at the same time. Paste the same expression on the opacity property of both shapes (not the layer’s opacity). Swap the “0” and the “100” for the open eyes shape expression.

[Brendon Murphy]

Assets do not collect within a project. When you make changes within a project, AE is just *referencing* those assets in their original location on your computer or hard drive. If your project and all the assets stay on the same computer, network, or hard drive, there is no reason to “collect files”. You would just save your project incrementally along the way.

If you need to share a project with someone who does not have access to all of the files that after effects is using, that’s when you have the program copy, or “collect”, the assets into a single folder. That folder can then be moved to a different location and the project saved inside will open without missing assets. You might also do this when you are backing up a project so that all assets referenced by the project are also backed up.

[Brendon Murphy]

But to answer the original question, you CAN clamp the values of the slider by putting this expression on it:

 clamp(value, min=0, max=100);

[Brendon Murphy]

If the only two states you want are 0 opacity and 100 opacity, use a checkbox instead. Say you have a checkbox on your eye layer named “Close Eyes”. Put this expression on the opacity:

checkbox = effect("Close Eyes")("Checkbox");
if (checkbox==1){100}else{0};

[Brendon Murphy]

Ah, ok. I don’t know much about AHK, but it seems like running the third party script is the hard part. If you’ve already got that going, maybe you can use a “sleep” delay to attempt running the checker Script from AHK every 15 sec. Write a function into the checker script so that every time it finishes, it writes a text file out to your hard drive with the word “done”. AHK can look for this log before trying the checker each time. If it finds the word “done”, it deletes the word and moves on to the next step.

[Brendon Murphy]

As far as I know, the only way to run a script periodically would be to queue it from outside AE, like running it from a batch file using Task Scheduler (in Windows). It may make more sense to just run the script with your hotkey when the other one finishes – does it take longer than a second for it to execute?

Is your third party script a jsxbin? if its a jsx you can chain your scripts together.

[Brendon Murphy]

Yes, Mocha is a planar tracker. Think about a clipboard with a pattern painted on it – Mocha tracks how the pattern distorts as the clipboard is moved around (as opposed to tracking points like the AE tracker). Mocha lite is actually included in all versions of after effects CC, and will do everything you need here. Just select your footage then go to Animation>Track in Mocha AE. That will open your footage in Mocha!

A couple more tips – you can do your tracking on a de-grained version of your footage to make the track smoother. You can also export a hipass version to bring out more detail in the footage (google hipass after effects for tutorials).