[Madison Bullard]

haha wow that is WAY simpler (and it works too!). Thanks, Dan.

[Madison Bullard]

That expression seemed to get me further than before, as the error I got this time was “expression result must be of dimension 1, not 4”, which makes since because I’m applying the expression to the Hue on the “Color Balance (HLS)” effect, which is 1 dimension. When I corrected that by changing the last line to random(359), the expression made AE hang for about 1.5 minutes before giving me the “timeout while waiting for the engine” message.

I want to think all of this hanging has to do with the while() function, but perhaps my low disk space has something to do with it (I have <10gb on my AE drive). Do you think moving my media cache to a different drive might help?

Also, to answer your question from your last post, there are approximately 2 seconds between each “beat”, which might more accurately be called a trigger point. The color-change trigger should actually fall every 4 beats, but thats kinda irrelevant. I would just time the random color change to align with every 4 beats except that I want this project to be a skeleton that I can use to make other music videos in the future, so an all-sound-reactive project is important.

[Madison Bullard]

HI Dan, thanks for the reply.

I tried plugging in that expression and adjusting it as needed, but kept getting the same error I was getting when I was attempting to write other expressions with loops:

“timeout while waiting for the engine”

I have 16gb of RAM, so I find it hard to believe that its a memory issue, but maybe there are config settings I haven’t taken into account. Any other ideas? I know the expression is a bit complex but aside from that there is barely any render-intensive material in the comp. Really just one layer with a lightweight instance of Particular (never more than 300 particles visible at once).

Really appreciate the help!

The expression I used is below

pulse = (comp("soundkeys").layer("bridge amp").effect("Both Channels")("Slider"));

threshold = 15.0;
above = false;
frame = timeToFrames(time);
while (true){
t = framesToTime(frame);
if (above){
if (pulse.valueAtTime(t) < threshold){
frame++;
break;
}
}else if (pulse.valueAtTime(t) >= threshold){
above = true;
}
if (frame == 0){
break;
}
frame--
}
seedRandom(frame,true);
random([0,0,0,1],[1,1,1,1])