[Knubile]

Makes sense. Thanks for the info. You’ve been a great help.

[Knubile]

Thanks for the info.

I figured it out yesterday. I went about it the first way you mentioned.
I created a wav file for each video thumbnail that starts at the same point as the poster frame and set that as the background audio for the menu.
I did this 6 times. One for each item.

I have a static image for the 5 menu items not being previewed. I simply renamed the layer to something other than (%)video.

This is pretty good now, but of course I want to get a little braver and more complicated. 🙂

Is it possible to have a button link to one timeline, but preview a different one?

[Knubile]

So do I use a mask shape? I know how to create a square mask. The parameter is an array of 4 points.
How would I go about building a mask of many points? Better yet, what am I looking for in the documentation?

Where are the sample with the AE install? I can’t seem to find them.

Thanks

[Knubile]

I’ve found the solution!

Using the setValuesAtTimes method is much much quicker. Now the script loops through and creates two arrays. One array of composition times and one array of values. This method applies all the keyframes with one method call to after effects.
The 40 minutes to run the script has now been cut down to under 1 minute!

I’ve now used this approach on all my other scripts with large amounts of keyframes and the results are the same.

Lesson learned. If you have to set many keyframes(Tens of thousands) us the setValuesAtTimes method.

P.S. Turning on undo makes things worse. After Effects dies trying to keep undo history for every keyframe. Perhaps it will be different with this new approach though. I haven’t tried that.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

[Knubile]

If I comment out the one line that actually tells after effects to set the frame, the script takes maybe 3 seconds to run. So i’m sure its not my script. It making that call to AE to set a keyframe the 10 thousandth time.
Maybe I’ll try really simplifying things. I’ll create a very short script and see. Just to elimate all variables.

[Knubile]

Ah. You think like me! 🙂
I didn’t try that exactly, but pretty close. I ran the script to generate the first 20K keyframes, then stopped it. Closed down AE and even rebooted to make sure all RAM etc was released. Ran the script again, starting from 20K and it was very slow.

Is having thousands of keyframes normal in AE? Wouldn’t motion tracking generate just as many if not more? I’m wondering if AE hits some sort of wall if this many keyframes.

[Knubile]

Thanks for the prompt reply.

By dividing into manageable chunks do you mean into seperate aep(project) files, or just compositions within the same aep file?

They frames are used to animate an object to match some real live captured movement. The data is sampled at 5 times per second over 30 minutes.