[David Cabestany]

how do i access the comment on the expression?

[David Cabestany]

Maybe I’m oversimplifying things or just didn’t understand what you need but, can’t you achieve this by adding a wiggle expression to your object and then parent it to a null with the arc animation?

[David Cabestany]

I see. Thanks!
D.

[David Cabestany]

Talk to Lloyd Alvarez from aescripts.com or Andrew Kramer from videocopilot.net

[David Cabestany]

You mean, create keyframes for every object in your scene whose “visual position” is affected by a camera that you want to remove?
I have no idea how to do that, sorry. But I’m curious about it so I’m subscribing to this thread.

Why do you need that? What’s the problem with keeping your camera on the scene?

[David Cabestany]

It’s the nature of expressions to put a strain on your system, they recalculate their function each frame.

I few years ago I had a very complex project which had over 500 expressions reading text from external documents as well as few conditionals and other simpler stuff. When rendering tests and ram previews everything was fine, so I kept adding expressions over and over.

When I finally was ready to render the whole thing the project would crash every time I tried to start the renders, but it was to late to bake all the expressions. Long story short I used the secret preferences to force the machine to render each frame regardless of anything and even that way it took roughly three weeks to render 9 minutes of video. The render would move a few hundred frames, then stop without making the sheep noise so I ad to manually restart it each time.

Expressions are very useful, but they can become your worst nightmare if you abuse them as I did.

[David Cabestany]

May I suggest you contact Lloyd Alvarez at aescripts.com? You will have better chances of selling it over there than on your own.

Best,
D.

[David Cabestany]

Mr. Dan Ebberts to the rescue as always! Thanks!!!

Just for my own understanding, would you mind explaining why the modulo operator?
I understand that segLength is how often I wan my animation to repeat, in this case every 60 seconds. Then t is the comp’s time minus the in point, in this case the start of my comp, so that leaves us with the following:

at 60 seconds it would be

t=60-in point (which is 0) = 60

60/60 = 1, % (the remainder) = 0

so then

valueAtTime(t) would be 0, right?

How does that produce the desired behavior?

Thanks again!
D.

[David Cabestany]

Kevin,

Any idea how to use this expression to trigger the animation every given time (for example once every minute) instead of using keyframes?

Best,
D.

[David Cabestany]

Thanks guys,

Dave,

Yeah, I know about markers in the timeline, in fact I use them a lot. But I’m looking for an option to set the color of the precomps in the project panel, not the layers in the timeline.

John,

That’s what I’ve been doing, but when you precompose as your project grows it starts to become a bit tedious and time consuming. I use blue to visually identify the main comps I have (the ones that are for rendering) and then I paint the other ones whatever color, most of the time green. When the newly created precomps are also labeled blue it throws me off when I need to quickly find a main comp in the project panel.

Best,
D.