[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I would start with five horizontal guide lines evenly distributed to get the top centers of the five circles at the top. Or you could do ten so you have top and bottom. Start with the smallest circle at the top (at the second guideline), then scale up a copy around the first to match with the first guideline. Copy the third, move it down to third guide line and scale up. You will notice that the third “circle” will not be a circle, and you’ll need to adjust the top anchor point down,and possibly the shape of the two paths that make up the top half. Similarly the fourth.

Copy this entire set, rotate 180 and offset to create the other side. At this point you will need to add the master circle that encompasses both and probably adjust further. I would adjust just one side and delete the other copy and recopy the adjusted side to make sure they’re identical.

Finally, you’ll need to use the scissors and delete to cut the overlapped parts out.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Great. Yes, the time remapping requires that you either start from the right frame or modify the offset. Sounds like you discovered that.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I didn’t look very thoroughly, but it might be that you just need to add .value after (“Slider”).

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Depending on what you need to do, the valueAtTime() may work as well.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You can’t move the time indicator itself, but you can enable time remapping for the layer and use an expression to change the relative time to the same effect.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Put your anchor point at one corner of the rectangle, that will take care of half the task, as that will be your origin [0,0] point.

The width of the text with sourceRectAtTime().width plus some margin will give you the width of the rectangle.

That will control both the arrow and the rectangle during the animation.

To get it animated, you can use the linear() or ease() to map the motion to a specific time range:

cursor_x_motion = linear(time, start_time, end_time, 0, rect_width+2*margin)

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

As I recall, you can return an array of lines with string.split(“\R”) or string.split(“\n”).

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If online courses are fine, Lynda.com and Pluralsight are both quite good.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

The script claims compatibility with CC. I would install CC15 and give it a try there.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

A simple method would be to make several copies (like 5) of the layer and then offset them horizontally progressively further from the original. Then merge those 5 layers, keeping the transparent background and repeat the copy-offset-merge operation a couple of times.
If need be, do a horizontal directional blur to even out the result.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer