[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Its been a while – but I figured out the solution. If someone ever encounters this as well:
It had nothing to do with AE18/AE19.
I was running two ui elements coded by me, and both of them were using a variable called myPanel for the ui buttons.
I was under the impression that a variable like that would be contained in the script of one ui panel, but apparently it messed up when two panels were using the same name. It started adding buttons to the other panel, or bugged out completely.

Hope this helps someone in the future 😉

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Ooh, im gonna try that first thing in the morning.

I get the layer in a for loop, linked in the above post. The loop just runs. I could probably extract the index number of the comp for a specific layer from that loop, but i need the comp name. Ofcourse…now that you mention it…i probably couldve gotten the index number, and then simply check the name for said index number. Hmmmmm

Although i like your approach better ☺
Thanks!

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Oh wow, you actually found it – and quick too!
Thanks so much!
Ill have a good old read through – it sounds quite interesting!

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Sorry to necro such an old post – but I too am looking for a way to manipulate bold/faux-bold from expressions but cant find anything. @dan, any chance you could point me in the direction of that hack you are talking about? Really curious what the possibilities would be with that!

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Thanks mate,

See my EDIT at the top of the post.
I already had a sourcetext changing expression on the text layer which messed up my expression. A stupid mistake which i spent much too much time in fixing 😛

Still thanks for the help, though!

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Thanks Cliff, thats also a great approach for only using the resource string.
Both methodes work great! I have all the info I needed to continue and ive been adding some code since. Im finally beginning the feel like this project is getting somewhere ????

Damn you weird ass Extendscript 😛

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Wow, walter,….it was that easy, huh! Thanks so much!
I actually tried your method before, but I think i got the myPanel.grp.groupOne wrong and triend only groupOne instead. duh,…

Anyways, this works so now i can continue the tinkering! Great!

What im trying to achieve in the long run is the following:
I work with a company who creates automated personalised video. We alter after effects files and send them to our custom render farm to render out millions of videos automatically. The preparation of those after effects files for automated use however can take a bit of time…not much, but still 1-3 days. Im trying to semi-automate the process with a plugin. I now have a gui panel that can link layers to master layers with the push of a button. The next step was to populate a dropdownlist with the actual layers in my master comp (where the personalised variables are present) and link them through a dropdown….and from there on it needs to get more and more automated/fluid.

But, as said, this works – so i can continue breaking my mind on extendscript 😉

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Great test! Thats exactly what I am talking about. Although, as you said, in most animations this may not hold up I’m still very much interested in your workflow on converting cameramovements to baked in position/scale frames.
Im not based in the USA (Netherlands) so offline contact may be a bit tricky 😛 Any suggestions?

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Ah, good question. Although we make our own animations as well, in which we try to reduce the need for those effects as much as possible, we get a lot of 3rd party or ‘existing animation’ as well that we need to adapt to our machines. Our partners are instructed to not use those effects whenever possible, but existing animation usually already have cameras in them.

Also, for some more complex animation using a camera would cut down on the work needed when compared to animating all objects with position/scale. This results in less money spent on creating the animation oppossed to a bit heavier rendertime. Depending on the job this may be the best choice.

However, if there would be a ‘simple’ workflow to convert the use of camera to said position/scale keyframes we could have the benefit of using camera inside an animation with a (possibly) short rendertime.

[Jeroen Rommelaars]

Basically we feed database information into AE, where every line consists of several parameters, like personal information and images. For every line a new render is queued on our renderfarm where these parameters are replaced by the ones from the database.

We have been doing this through AE from day one, and have made big steps in increasing the renderspeed of our projects.

Almost everything is pre-rendered, except for those newly added values/images. Since these items have to move along with the animation, we kept the existing camera from the original animation (before we pre-rendered the background). This works perfectly, but I have the feeling using a camera for these simple movements is much heavier than just keyframing postition/scale.

I could manually try to recreate the movement the camera creates, but that will A: probably not be perfect and B: cost me a lot of time.
Therefore im looking for another solution. It may very well be there is none at this time, but it never hurts to ask around 🙂

and indeed, as Walter stated, it may not even be faster in the end. Still worth a shot though, especially since scenes without cameras render a lot faster in our current projects.