[Filip Vandueren]

There’s probably a complexer way to calculate it all within 1 expressionselector, but you could do this more easily with 3 range selectors:

1 random transition,

1 to “protect” words that have already been revealed

1 to keep hidden words that should not yet be revealed.

See attached project.

animateRandomLettersByWord.aep 79 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

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[Filip Vandueren]

That would actually be easier to sync (as it wouldn’t have to take in account the absolute lenght of the path), but animating the Trim Paths of a dashed line tends to yield unexpected results, especially for open paths…

[Filip Vandueren]

The only way to avoid the reappearing and disappearing would be to either have two copies of every shape (so that a triangle can be ‘cut’ in two when it approaches the edges) and a lot more complicated code, or to have the lines extend beyond the sides of the composition so the sudden switch from one side to the other is masked off…

More things to think about: to have shapes align exactly with dashes, all the dashes and gaps have to add up exactly to the total length of your line (or be a perfect fraction of the lines length)

Attached is my version of having the position of a shapelayer be tied to the dash-offset, (still with sudden shift) it was a bit more complicated than I first thought because the dash offset is in absolute numbers, not in a 0-360° Phase like Trim Paths.

But also, like I mentioned in my previous post: the simplest solution is just to add a motion tile

loop-shapes-along-path.aep 174 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

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[Filip Vandueren]

a Modulo % operator on the positionOnPath() should do the trick, but it will cause objects to suddenly disappear/appear from one end to the next.

Does it have to be a vector-based result, or can you get away by using MotionTile or the Distort > Offset Effect ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Like this:

slider =effect("Slider Control")("Slider").value;
startCount = 0;
endCount = 10000;
num = Math.round(linear(slider,0,100,startCount,endCount));
num.toString().padStart(5,"0");

[Filip Vandueren]

Your text should be Black with the text animator trying to add a White Fill, limited by the expression selector.

If you have white text and a black fill+expression, your colors will be in effect inverted.

[Filip Vandueren]

Depends on what you want to randomize, but you’ll want to have a persistent random value for each character, like this:

seedRandom(textIndex,true);
freq = 1.5;
decay = 8;
duration = 0.18 + random(0.8);
retard = textIndex*thisComp.frameDuration*1;
t = time - (inPoint + retard);
startVal = [100,100,100];
endVal = [0,0,0];
if (t < duration){
linear(t,0,duration,startVal,endVal);
}else{
amp = (endVal - startVal)/duration;
w = freq*Math.PI*2;
endVal + amp*(Math.sin((t-duration)*w)/Math.exp(decay*(t-duration))/w);
}

[Filip Vandueren]

Here’s an update:

speedRampLength = 2; // create a speedRamp over 2 seconds
speedRampSkip= 12; // at the end of the 2sec speedramp, 12 seconds have been skipped.
speedRampTension = 80; // how much easeOut (0.1-100)

comp = app.project.activeItem;
var myLayer = comp.layer(1);
duration = myLayer.outPoint-myLayer.inPoint;
// sanity checks
speedRampSkip = Math.min(speedRampSkip, duration);
speedRampLength = Math.min(speedRampLength, duration-speedRampLength);

myLayer.timeRemapEnabled = true;
var timeRemapProp = myLayer.property("ADBE Time Remapping");
// remove lastKeyframe
timeRemapProp.removeKey(2)
// add new keyframes:
timeRemapProp.setValuesAtTimes([
    myLayer.inPoint+ (duration - speedRampSkip)/2,
    myLayer.inPoint+ (duration - speedRampSkip)/2 + speedRampLength,
    myLayer.inPoint+ (duration - speedRampSkip + speedRampLength)
], [
    (duration - speedRampSkip)/2,
    (duration - speedRampSkip)/2 + speedRampSkip,
    duration
])
myLayer.outPoint = myLayer.inPoint+ (duration - speedRampSkip + speedRampLength);
var ease = new KeyframeEase(1, speedRampTension);
var noEase = new KeyframeEase(1, 0.1);
timeRemapProp.setTemporalEaseAtKey(2,[noEase],[ease]);
timeRemapProp.setTemporalEaseAtKey(3,[ease],[noEase]);

[Filip Vandueren]

The script needs to know how long that transition should be, exactly where it should occur, how much faster you want the motion to ramp up to…

It’s definitely easier to do it by eye and hand, unless you have dozens of these to automate.

[Filip Vandueren]

I didn’t watch the whole video, but this is exactly what they did at the timestamp you linked…

How would the script know how much shorter you want the video to be ?