[Jeremy Dance]

For anyone who might run into this problem into the future, a good way to debug this is to open the graph editor and then press “show post expression graph” right next to the equals sign that enables or disables the expression. If you are like me you might find that you have a stray keyframe way down in your comp that is making the expression not seem to work

[Jeremy Dance]

And because these forums are searchable. Most of the time the questions I’ve had in after effects have been answered by threads that are old.

[Jeremy Dance]

For me it is a current question. I’d like to know how to generate a static peak file that I can use to show progress through a song.

[Jeremy Dance]

I get around this by putting my layers in a precomp then doing all the pin animation there. Then precomping that and doing all effects and position movements there. Imagine 3 levels. Level 1 (the deepest precomp) is just the static image, level 2 is the puppet pin, level 3 is effects and transformations (position, scale, etc)

I’ve found that if I try and puppet pin and animate position in the same comp I get this exact same issue you are experiencing. I’ve haven’t run into the problems dave is referring to, precomping solves things quite nicely for me.

[Jeremy Dance]

Actually I think the question is a little bit different. You are talking about two different things. The audio waveform effect generates a dynamic effect based on the sound at the current time. However I believe the question is referring to the static waveform you see when you twirl down the audio. Is there a way to create that image (static – peak file essentially) in an after effects project?

[Jeremy Dance]

For anyone finding this post much later, my solution to compare quotes in an expression was to convert it to it’s code.

For example

if (string.charCodeAt(0) == 8221) {
do stuff }
else if (string.charCodeAt(0) == 8220){
do stuff
{

Those are the codes for right and left curly quotation marks in AE

[Jeremy Dance]

Just figured it out. For those wondering, it is possible to access the “inner” bounding box. It is called the extents. If you put false (rather than true as I had done) it will only consider the extent of the text, rather than the extent of the paragraph bounding box.

watchLayer = thisComp.layer("myParagraphText");
myHeight = watchLayer.sourceRectAtTime(time-watchLayer.inPoint,false).height;
heightBuffer = thisLayer.effect("heightBuffer")("Slider");
myHeight + heightBuffer;

[Jeremy Dance]

Thanks!

I’m curious as to where in the documentation I could learn more about this. I’m not sure what words to search in the scripting guide to find it. I’m sure I’ll run into it more.

For example, I couldn’t get the number I wanted for opacity until I multiplied it by (100/255). What causes that strange behavior?

myfxComp.property(“Effects”).property(“Drop Shadow”).property(“Opacity”).setValue(43*255/100);
The above line sets the percentage to 43%

myComp.property("Effects").property("Drop Shadow").property("Opacity").setValue(43*255/100);