[Juergen Saalmueller]

Hi Scott,

apologies i have been away for some time.
Thank you for your advice – it did get me started. I’m reading in the file and your code gets the text from the file displayed in a comp. I think i can experiment a little more and get it to do what i want.

The hope is that i can replace this code (in Source Text expression):

eval(“var array=” + footage(“GarminDataFile.json”).sourceText);

l = array.length;
sek = Math.floor(time);
if(sek < l){
array[sek].bpm;
}else{
“End of Data”;
}

which opens the json file in every frame and then reads in a value to display every second with some code that reads the file just once, stores the data in a variable (e.g. an array called bpm) and then only accesses that variable from each frame (one value for every second) avoiding the time consuming file operation.

Cheers
Juergen

[Juergen Saalmueller]

Hi Scott,
I am using 2018 and tried that functionality but it makes preview and rendering unacceptably slow. Having three gauges on the screen animated via expressions changes render time from roughly 7 minutes per minute of footage to an estimated 42 hours per minute. So using expressions is impractical.
Tried to convert to keyframes but cancelled that after it was still running after two hours for a 30 second clip. I suspect the multiple file reads from each frame in each expression cause the delay and was hoping that storing the data in a global array variable and referencing that from the composition would circumvent that problem.

Cheers
J