[Chris Smith]

Okay that’s helpful. I want to work this out, but I don’t have the time to make this delivery. After my time frees up I’ll come back, work on it, and post a solution if I can find it.

Thanks!

[Chris Smith]

I had an idea when I woke up but it didn’t work either. I don’t really understand what you mean by loop back to find the first frame. Could you show me an example script?

The goal is so that if I retime the slider, all the elements fade in at the right time, as determined by the text layer counting up. I don’t know how to tell it “now” and “now + 1sec.” It seems like there should be some way to do that. There’s a javascript function Date.now(), but it doesn’t seem to work either.

Is there any way to step through the code and see what values the variables are being assigned? When I program in Java on NetBeans, I can step through the code line by line and make sure what variable is getting what value and why. I don’t see a way to do that in AE. It’s kinda like using a 1990s compiler that won’t tell you your errors until you compile.

Anyway, this is due tomorrow, so worst case I’ll just time it by hand, but I was hoping to have things change their timing dynamically based on what I do to the slider in & out.

opacityMin = 0;
opacityMax = 100;
slider = Math.round(thisComp.layer("1975").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));
date = 1980;
now = 0;
animateIn = linear(time, now, now+1, opacityMin, opacityMax);
if(slider >= date) {now = time; animateIn} else {0};

Alternate:

opacityMin = 0;
opacityMax = 100;
slider = Math.round(thisComp.layer("1975").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));
date = 1980;
now = 0;
animateIn = linear(time, now, now+1, opacityMin, opacityMax);
if(slider >= date) {now = Date.now(); animateIn} else {0};

[Chris Smith]

Well we have several machines, but they’re all running OSX 10.10.5, and we’re about to get new machines so that kinda prompted the question. I put it here because we’re OSX specific and don’t really care about PCs. With the variations I was just kinda looking for a rule of thumb rather than a definitive answer, but it sounds like you gave that so thank you very much. When possible I’ll use a port per device rather than chain if efficiency of data transfer is important for that task.

Thanks!

[Chris Smith]

Wow particle generator was the way to go! With that lead and the help of the ‘Particle Party’ video tutorial here I got it done and it looks pretty good. Thank you. Now the tweaking . . .

C

[Chris Smith]

I have a very similar issue, but it’s not solved by this solution and I can’t seem to find one online nor figure it out on my own:

I have an animated image of a finger tracing out some motions. I’d like to create something that will trace out the movement of the fingertip and decay after about 3 to 4 seconds after the fingertip passes any given point. The fingertip follows a crazy bezier line (but the path of the line might change according to client wishes). Think about a glow stick at night and how your eyes perceive a delayed decay of the motion of the glow stick. The motion blur solution (using Motion 3) applies blur to all elements on the screen and not to a single item.

The solution I was thinking about was to create a colored circle that is hidden under the fingertip matching its motion. That works fine. I can’t find a way to have the circle leave tracers in its wake. I tried echo and tracer, but as noted above that only works on images and not animated elements. I applied the motion blur filter, but that did nothing to the motion of the circle either.

I can’t think of any other solution than to generate an image of a line and rotoscope it out, or try to work out a ‘Write On’ behavior and I really don’t like either of those options because if the track of the finger changes, then I’ll have to redo the whole process. I don’t think the particle generator will work with out a lot of trial and error and then it’s really not the same effect. Think of a fingertip moving through a slow reacting foam (like memory foam). The impression is still there for a few seconds even when the finger is removed – but I want to do it as a color trace. Any ideas?

C