[Michael Szalapski]

That’s not an AE issue, that’s a user understanding issue.

You are asking for a composition that is four seconds long and you’re getting one. You are forgetting to count the first frame which is NOT, as you assume, frame 00:00:00:01, but is, in fact 00:00:00:00. If you create a composition that is four seconds and one frame long, you’ll get the ending number you expect.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

What version of After Effects are you using?

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Here’s an example I knocked up really quick: 10735_sparkles.aep.zip

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You could do that with any of several particle effects. It wouldn’t take much work to produce.
Just spawn a bunch of sparkle-shaped particles outward and wipe below them as they go.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

To be fair, the higher end MacBook Pros do look really nice and I really do like that Touch Bar thing they’ve added to it. Anything to keep my hands on the keyboard area and out of the menus is beneficial.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

[Abdul Latif] “Where am I start with it?”

Start at this link: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/how-to/adobe-character-animator.html

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Optical Flares has an option to place flares based on luminance. Perhaps a typeface with dots on it would work or you could create text and then put dots on it with a paintbrush (in AE or Photoshop) and the flares would track to it.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Have you considered using Adobe Character Animator? It’s really easy to animate with it.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

The problem with stuff like this is that it works for a still picture, but not for animation. You can create actions in Photoshop to create stuff like this and apply it across frames of a video file, but there is going to be a lot of jerking, flashing, etc. as there is no temporal data. There is a cartoon effect built into AE, but you’d need to use a LOT of other effects along with it do get something like what you’ve got and it would look odd in motion.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

If you edit the sound clip in something like Audition to isolate the frequencies you’d like AE to respond to (and save it as a different name), you can use the convert audio to keyframes feature inside AE to pull data from that new sound file.

Granted, Sound Keys is a much faster way to do it, but if you don’t already have it and don’t want to spend money, you can still do it with native Adobe tools.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.