[Eric Steinberg]

Ok, after doing som reading on Dan Ebberts site ( https://www.motionscript.com ) and experimenting a little bit, I think I got it now!
By restricting the results of the calls to random to the values between 40% and 60% of the width and height of the comp,
this expression seems to do what I want:

minVal = [0.4*thisComp.width, 0.4*thisComp.height] ;
maxVal = [0.6*thisComp.width, 0.6*thisComp.height] ;

seedRandom(3,true) ;
random(minVal,maxVal)

I’ll play with it a little more to make sure, but I think this is it!
I appreciate your previous help, I just didn’t explain clearly enough what I needed.

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

Ok, after doing som reading on Dan Ebberts site ( https://www.motionscript.com ) and experimenting a little bit, I think I got it now!
By restricting the results of the calls to random to the values between 40% and 60% of the width and height of the comp,
this expression seems to do what I want:

minVal = [0.4*thisComp.width, 0.4*thisComp.height] ;
maxVal = [0.6*thisComp.width, 0.6*thisComp.height] ;

seedRandom(3,true) ;
random(minVal,maxVal)

I’ll play with it a little more to make sure, but I think this is it!
I appreciate your previous help, I just didn’t explain clearly enough what I needed.

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

Thank you, now it is random in x and y. But I have to apologize, I didn’t check the first one properly, it actually doesn’t do what I want. I want the clip to stay in the same position once a random position is assigned. I’m sorry if I didn’t describe properly what I’m going for; I’ll try desribing it a little more clearly:

An expression that will make the position of the footage item be randomly offset by maximum 150 pixels (x and y), and for the whole duration of the clip it stays locked/fixed in the same position. I then want to duplicate that layer, replace footage in the duplicate, and move this new layer to a later point in time in the timeline. Now this new layer will also have a randomly offset position by maximum 150 pixels, but it is a different random position than the first layer. And this new layer’s position also stays locked for its duration. Then I want to be able to keep doing this: Duplicating layers, replacing footage, and sliding down the timeline the new layers, and each time they will have a different, fixed position.

Hope this makes sense.. :-}

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

Thank you, now it is random in x and y. But I have to apologize, I didn’t check the first one properly, it actually doesn’t do what I want. I want the clip to stay in the same position once a random position is assigned. I’m sorry if I didn’t describe properly what I’m going for; I’ll try desribing it a little more clearly:

An expression that will make the position of the footage item be randomly offset by maximum 150 pixels (x and y), and for the whole duration of the clip it stays locked/fixed in the same position. I then want to duplicate that layer, replace footage in the duplicate, and move this new layer to a later point in time in the timeline. Now this new layer will also have a randomly offset position by maximum 150 pixels, but it is a different random position than the first layer. And this new layer’s position also stays locked for its duration. Then I want to be able to keep doing this: Duplicating layers, replacing footage, and sliding down the timeline the new layers, and each time they will have a different, fixed position.

Hope this makes sense.. :-}

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

Thanks, I’ll try that first!

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

No, I didn’t think about those, thanks for the suggestion! I’ll try those!

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

To answer your question: Because I don’t know expressions very well at all! 😉 But anyway, thank you so much, that does exactly what I need…almost. Your expression puts the item in a random position in the x-axis, but not in the y-axis. I thought I would be brave and try to write one that works in y also, so I wrote:

new_position=position+random[(-150,150),(-150,150)]

but that didn’t work. It actually made AE shut down!! So if you could help me with an expression that affects the position in x and y, I would be very grateful!

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

To answer your question: Because I don’t know expressions very well at all! 😉 But anyway, thank you so much, that does exactly what I need…almost. Your expression puts the item in a random position in the x-axis, but not in the y-axis. I thought I would be brave and try to write one that works in y also, so I wrote:

new_position=position+random[(-150,150),(-150,150)]

but that didn’t work. It actually made AE shut down!! So if you could help me with an expression that affects the position in x and y, I would be very grateful!

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

If you duplicate the last item in the render que after you rendered it, the duplicate will be active and ready to que for render. It will have all the settings from your last render, and you can now save a template. Is that what you were going for? Hope this helps,

Kind regards,
Eric

[Eric Steinberg]

You can purge memory during render by setting the “secret” setting in preferences. Hold the shift key down when accesing preferences, wait till pref dialog appears before letting go of the shift key. Then set to purge every 5 frames or so, maybe less if it still crashes.

Kind regards,
Eric