[Jaakko Rinne]

I’m resurrecting an ancient thread here, so sorry for that. First my thanks to the original posters: this thread helped me find a solution to my own work, which was adding temperature displays to an industrial video where we had measurement times and temperatures for multiple sensors in an Excel sheet.

The original data was 1 column with a timestamp and 1 column with temperature. I massaged that in Openoffice Calc to 1 column with start time in seconds, 1 column with stop time (that is just the next measurement time) and a final column with the temperature and a degrees Celcius sign. The data looks like this:

0 1.796 20,20°C
1.796 2.874 20,20°C
2.874 3.952 19,89°C
3.952 5.03 19,89°C
5.03 6.108 19,77°C

The tabs show up as spaces.

I modified Walter Soyka’s original expression so that it uses the time in seconds instead a timecode format and ended up with this:
textLines = text.sourceText.split('\r');
result = "";

for (i=0; i < textLines.length; i++) {
t = textLines[i].split('\t');
adjustedTime = time + thisComp.displayStartTime;
if ( (adjustedTime >= t[0]) && (adjustedTime <= t[1]) ) {
result = t[2];
break;
}
}

result

This expression is sadly quite slow for large-ish amounts of data. I have data from 9 temperature sensors with 1490 lines each. AE really doesn’t seem to like this amount.

Thankfully my data only updates about once every second, so I created my composition at 2fps.

I hope my post helps if someone is looking for a solution to a similar Excel to After Effects problem.

[Jaakko Rinne]

Thanks for the replies, Filip.

To “quantify” what I would like the ponytail rotation to do:
– Rotate slightly clockwise if the head is moving right and rotate slightly counterclockwise if the head is moving left. The amount of rotation should depend on the speed the head is moving at.
– Rotate ponytail “down” if the head moves up. Rotation speed should depend on the speed the head is moving at.
– Rotate ponytail “up” if the head moves down. The amount of rotation should depend on the speed the head is moving at.
– Rotate left and right and slowly stop rotations like a pendulum when the head stops after movement.
– Rotate left or right as if with momentum if the head suddenly changes its movement direction.

The expression you posted already has most of these effects, but doesn’t seem to take into account if the head is moving downwards quickly (the ponytail just hangs down). I would also like for the ponytail to have a bit more “swing” to it, that is, bigger rotation. When the head moves sideways fast, the ponytail should go up to around a 90 degree rotation in either direction and when the head moves down fast, the ponytail should possibly do up to 180 degrees.

I think I understand what the values for inertia and stiffness affect, but which part of the expression should I edit to increase the amount of rotation? I should probably create an effect control slider for this, like I did for inertia and stiffness.