[Nick Hill]

You can do something like –

(layer’s position property)

L = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”); // rename for your null
L.transform.position;

(rotation)

L = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”);
L.transform.rotation;

etc.

But then you’d need to add extra complexity to it to handle the switchover – and if the nulls are in different positions the layer would jump.

A better solution might be to parent Null 2 to Null 1, and the layer to Null 2. Then just move one null at once.

[Nick Hill]

Amazing. Thank you Dan!

*doffs hat*

[Nick Hill]

Thanks all. I don’t think converting audio to keyframes will do what I want (I need the marker to fire off the sfx, not the other way round) but I’ll have a look at Soundkeys 🙂

[Nick Hill]

Yes, it can – just create a PAL comp, drag your 1080p comp into it and then scale it down. AE “thinks” in seconds, so it doesn’t really matter that you’re comverting from 29.97 frames/sec to 25 – it’ll reinterpret the keyframes on the fly.

Regarding aspect ratios, it depends: is the PAL destination widescreen or 4:3? Adobe changed the default aspect ratios in CS4, so a 1920×1080 comp dragged into a 16:9 PAL comp will either have black bars either side, or crop a small amount off the top and bottom. It’s up to you which of these is more acceptable.

[Nick Hill]

You mean the comp which represents your .ai file doesn’t stretch any more? You should be able to go into this comp and extend the length of that, and then in the parent comp you’ll be able to drag its end point out to make it longer.

If you go to Preferences > Import, then you can set the default length of anything you import to be the length of the composition you’re dragging it into (or any other value) so you don’t have to bother extending it each time. My guess is that the “00:00:01:00” option is ticked which would make each still image one second long.

[Nick Hill]

If you only need to affect the appearance of one text layer, you might be able to just apply the effects directly to the text and not use an adjustment layer. If not, then precompose all the text layers you want the effect to apply to, and put an adjustment layer at the top of this precomp.

[Nick Hill]

Thanks Dan! A maths wizard as ever 🙂

[Nick Hill]

If you want a set of tutorial videos, you can’t do much better than Andrew Kramer’s at https://www.videocopilot.net. Start with the early ones – he explains expressions very well, and each video has a point – ie you end up making something, rather than “this video explains about the anchor point” which some tutorials are like.

[Nick Hill]

have you tried rendering to, say, Photoshop image sequence first, then importing that and rerendering to mpeg2? I find it’s better to render to image sequences with anything complex, then if it crashes or hangs you can pick up where it left off.

only other thought is – have you checked task manager > processes? sometimes you might have a process which is eating all the cpu power.

[Nick Hill]

Ah. No, I hadn’t – thank you!

I’m going to go away now and try and get my head round how it works – it still seems a bit of a dark art…