That DID work! I never knew that the order of variable assignments could be an issue. Thank you as always for the help.

Sadly, no. Tried it a few ways and always returns some variation of “Cannot read property of undefined”

a=thisComp.layer("controls").effect("show")("Menu"); //value of Show menu
b=thisComp.layer("controls").effect("layout 2")("Menu"); //value of Layout menu
showList=[show1, show1, show2]; //dummy "show 1" at [0] for…

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So, I have 40 different shows, each with 4 different layouts and I need to park a day/time box on a specific point on each layout. Sadly, the layouts are slightly different for each show so there’s no “one size fits all” approach.

So I thought each show has an array of four positions, one for each layout, and select the position via a “Layout”…

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Sadly, that code failed as “Invalid or unexpected token” on the .replace line. I double-checked and the Expressions are set to JavaScript. I got this very simple test code to work:

text.sourceText.replace(“e”, “c”)

But of course I’m not trying to replace e with c (if only life were so simple). I tried copy/pasting the (/”/g, “u201C$&u201D”) over…

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After lots of searching and experimentation, I still haven’t found a solution so turning to the pros.

I’ve made a mogrt for a lower-third in AE 2020 (they won’t let us upgrade). Everything works fine except if you type quotes into the mogrt text field, they come out as straight quotes on screen instead of the curly quotes we want. Don’t know why…

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I’ve hunted the Internet and the Adobe forums with no luck. My company has a hybrid work setup, so part of the week we’re home, part in the office. We have Creative Cloud Enterprise. We use SharePoint as a storehouse for projects and assets. We run MacBook Pros and a couple Mac Minis, all using Ventura. Our AE is 2020 (can’t be updated, long…

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Thanks, Dan. Your suggestion got me looking in the right direction enough I was able to stumble onto a solution. Not super-elegant but it’ll do the job. Appreciate the help!

Couldn’t find a previous solution that quite matches my situation, or one I could adjust to fit.

Building a TV tag mogrt and I have a circle shape and a text block of separate animating text layers that lives in the circle. The layers are precomped but need to remain as separate layers. The height is naturally variable depending on the title…

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Need to create a bullet list that can easily be edited and controlled in Premiere (not my strongest software). The whole list can be visible from the start, just any points not being discussed are at 50% opacity, while the current point is 100%. The number of bullets and amount of text can vary wildly.

Finding the text abilities in Premiere to be a…

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[blank stare]

Not gonna lie, you guys lost me about two turns back. Followed most of that but some was way deeper than my piddling expression knowledge goes. Going to file it under “don’t do it like this” and go back to banging rocks together. Really appreciate you both taking a look at it! Hopefully it was a fun little brain-teaser.

On the plus…

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I agree it’s baffling. I can’t see any reason for this behavior. I was able to patch around it by killing the math and just altering the array values to be what I needed, but I have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing. Thanks for looking at it. Glad it wasn’t some super-simple mistake I made.

Here is a super-streamlined version. I commented the heck out of the code to hopefully show the trouble spots.

Happy to. Let me clean it up a little and I’ll post it up.

Added weirdness: I just put a placeholder value at array[0] since it will never get called (there will always be at least 1 visible layer) and the expression broke if array[0] was not a number. Doesn’t matter that value is not being used, After Effects isn’t having it. Using the same code in Source Text on a text layer is fine, but anything…

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Messing around with it more, and have found everything works as expected and the math is all fine UNTIL I use it to call the value from the array. I checked and nothing is less than 0, I get the expected values at every step, but as soon as I subtract 1 (this value is confirmed to be not less than 0) and pass that to the array call, After Effects…

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Appreciate the answer but that’s not what I’m after. I’m adding the five alpha values to get Total, then I just want to subtract 1 from Total and After Effects freaks out. “Add five numbers then subtract one from that sum” seems simple enough, but AE refuses. Are sampleImage() alpha values strings and not numerical values? Can’t imagine why…

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I suppose I could just alter the array values to work with the returned value, but I want to understand why this isn’t working. Sure seems like it should. Pretty basic math, I thought.

Just starting on an expression and have hit a bizarre wall. I’m using sampleImage() to test 5 layers and see if they have alpha in their centers, essentially testing if they’re empty or not. Then I add those five values to give me a number of “full” layers from 1 to 5 (one layer will always be full). Then I use that number to get a value from an…

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Amazing! After reading your explanation and examples, I can now consistently put Layer b pretty much where I want on Layer a. More importantly, I think I now understand the syntax enough to make it work on more complex future projects (and probably sort out fromComp and toWorld). Thank you so much for finally sinking this into my brain!

If you…

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Working on a project and once again needed to get the coordinates of a specific edge. After a lot of trial and error, experimentation, and copying code from much smarter people’s examples online I finally got things to work with toComp but damned if I fully understand why. I certainly couldn’t explain it or do it again

I get the basic concept of…

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Once I changed the tracking type to Before, that worked like a charm. Still don’t fully get how textIndex works but this helps it make a bit more sense. Thank you so much!

As always, your knowledge and help are amazing. Many thanks!

One more question, if I may: when duplicating the Animator to adjust the Tracking after the “A,” it seems to only work on the last “A” in the line and the caution arrow icon/alert message keeps blipping on and off like it’s thinking about failing. I’m sure it’s something to do with my…

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No matter how many Google searches and YouTube videos, I just can’t make this work. I got it close but it seems to have a life of its own that messes with my troubleshooting.

Short version, I want it to look through a text layer, find the letter “A,” then check the letter before that and, if it matches a letter from a predefined array, adjust the…

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