[Jake Brown]

Hello there,

In your case, a particle system would be helpful, but you might not have access to that.

The way I would approach this would be by slowly building up layers of arrows via pre-comping. I’ve made an example AE project below for you:

To create the spirals of arrows, I would just take the same approach again, but this time, instead of beginning from a straight line, I would start from a slightly curved line and then begin building up the layers.

Using the turbulent displace effect in moderation can be powerful, too.

Good luck!

Weather-Front-1.aep 322 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

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[Jake Brown]

Hello, I just wrote a script that allows you to target a specific effect across all comps. This should work just fine for your needs.

var effectName = prompt("Name of effect", "Hue/Saturation");
var effectNameStr = effectName.toString();
var projItem = app.project.items;
var counter = 0;
for (i = 1; i < app.project.items.length; i++) {
    // Check if item is a composition
    if (projItem[i] instanceof CompItem) {
        var myComp = projItem[i];
        // Cycle thru comp layers
        for (n = 1; n <= myComp.numLayers; n++) {
            // Test if layer has effect in question;
            if (myComp.layers[n].property("Effects").property(effectNameStr) != null) {
                var bool = myComp.layers[n].property("Effects").property(effectNameStr).enabled;
                while (myComp.layers[n].property("Effects").property(effectNameStr).enabled === bool) {
                    // Toggle  effects on/off
                    myComp.layers[n].property("Effects").property(effectNameStr).enabled = !myComp.layers[n].property("Effects").property(effectNameStr).enabled;
                    counter++;
                };
            };
        };
    };
};
// Report what the script did
if (counter > 0) {
    alert("Success! " + counter + " " + effectNameStr + " enabled/disabled");
} else {
    alert("Could not find any instances of layers with " + effectNameStr);
}

[Jake Brown]

I actually managed to get to the bottom of my question.

It turns out there’s a method called frameToPng() which takes a couple of arguments that specify the time and output location. Very handy.