[Filip Vandueren]

You can add a “Audio -> Tone” Effect to the comp-layer.
This will force the layer to generate audio and reveal the audio levels property.

After you’ve assigned your expression to the audio levels, it is safe to remove the Tone effect.

The audio levels property will be hidden again, but the expression will remain in place for when the pre-composition gets sound again in the future.

Alternatively, just keep the tone effect but set its Level parameter to 0%

[Filip Vandueren]

Yes, it can only be done with a script.

I don’t think .mogrt’s can trigger scripts yet ?
So you cannot give the premiere user dynamicly populated dropdowns without having them run a script inbetween selections.

If it’s just the look of an effect, then could it suffice to just offer placeholder-text like “Option 1″,”Option 2” ?

Or is it setting text-options ? More like select a country first, then select a state/region from that country ?

BTW, the result of a dropdown menu will always just be an index, so even if a script changed the label of allt he options, an expression will not know the new values, only the number of the selected option, and the expression would have to do all the logic the script does too, just to know what actually is selected.

[Filip Vandueren]

I think the easiest would be to have a hidden text-layer that copies all the properties of the first one, but with an expression on sourceText so it only shows the first line.

(Or you can set it up with a textanimator that sets everything except line 1 to scale 0)

Then use the sourceRect of that layer.

[Filip Vandueren]

app.findMenuCommandId(“Convert to Editable Text”); // should return 3799

so:

app.executeCommand(3799);

this should convert the currently selected layer(s) from Photoshop text-layers to after effects textlayers.

[Filip Vandueren]

I guess the script can’t add it to the layer via an expression ?

[Filip Vandueren]

If you don’t need the actual number of the scale for a different purpose, but just need a shape that has the right form, consider this:

Add a new Path to your Shape, give it this expression:

s=content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size;
createPath([ [0,0],[s[0]/2,s[1]/2],[s[0]/2,s[1]/-2] ],[],[],true);

[Filip Vandueren]

Thanks for the tip Andrei, we can see the numbers (that I visualized to debug) glitching too. Very annoying.

[Filip Vandueren]

Here’s the state I’m at now.
It works perfectly well (though rather slow) inside of After Effects.

But unfortunately it’s glitchy as hell once it’s a Mogrt in Premiere:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wprxdr5rzw2ueut/Screen%20Recording%202020-10-06%20at%2022.21.03.mov?dl=0

Quite frustrating as you can tell…

[Filip Vandueren]

I think this should work for words:

words=value.match(/([^\s\u0003]*[\s+|\u0003]?)/g);
minRate = 10; // frames per character
maxRate = 20;
wordCount = 0;
t = inPoint;
seedRandom(index,true);
while (t < time){
    wordCount++;
    t += framesToTime(random(minRate,maxRate));
}
words.slice(0,wordCount).join("");

[Filip Vandueren]

Oops, but that does mean you’d have to create keyframes though.