I just emptied my disk cache and media cache to see what kind of difference it makes in the Render Time column. The “Frame Render Time” displays anywhere from 20ms to 1 second, and everywhere in between – both when I preview and pause, or jump to a random frame. I have always experienced that kind of inconsistency, so I’m surprised that you find i…

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For my current project, I’ve been using my phone’s stopwatch to time a cache/preview of the timeline. Then I’ll make my adjustments and time it again. I find the Render Time column inconsistent and pretty useless. I think it’s been more helpful to me in the past for comparing layers with lots of effects. But in this project, I have 100 identical…

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Very helpful, thank you! The posterizeTime(0) trick was new to me and will come in handy.

I’m trying to understand how your 0% Opacity suggestion works, though. Because I can clearly see After Effects making the calculations when the layer is at 0%, or even disabled with the eye icon. If you scrub through, the values of expression driven…

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Perhaps someone can settle this for me. ChatGPT and Gemini are giving me conflicting answers, but it looks like I may have been writing expressions wrong for years…

Let’s say I have a ton of layers with a Position expression. A chunk of the expression calculates the same value on every layer. Normally, I would put that chunk on a separate slider…

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I’ve used layer space transforms for years, but never was great at it, and now I’m stumped. I have a Radial Shadow effect on a Solid layer. I am trying to attach the effect’s “Light Source” property to a Light layer. Dan Ebbert’s expression from motionscript.com is the natural place to start:

L = thisComp.layer(“Light 1…

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That works so perfectly, I can’t thank you enough, Dan! Your expression skills are legendary, and I’m so grateful.

I’m looking to position some layers in a sphere formation. I realize I could do this by parenting each layer to a separate Null Object, and then rotating the Nulls to make the layers orbit around to different positions on the sphere. But for the project I’m making, I would really prefer to do this with an expression if possible.

This expression…

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Great, I’ll do that. Thanks

That’s it, thanks so much Dan.

I should add that as it is written, this expression works to find the order of the layer, counting only the layers whose names BEGIN with “Control Layer”. I should have specified my layers have “Control Layer” in the name, but they don’t start with that string of characters. I simply changed the “==” in the if…

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I have a comp with many layers. Some of those layers have “Control Layer” in their name. I’m looking for an expression to put on those layers, to get its number in the order. So if it’s the fifth control layer, it would give a result of 5, even if that layer’s actual index is higher.

I really appreciate any guidance anyone can give me.

Thanks, Dan. I couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. But I realized I hadn’t thought this all the way through. I wasn’t factoring in a moving camera and how the position of layers would need to shift to stay aligned as the camera moved. Since I can’t have them shifting like that, I’ll need to figure out another solution. Thanks for the taking…

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I’ve searched all over but haven’t found a solution for this…

I have two 3D layers with different dimensions, different Scale, and different Z-depths. Layer A is far in the distance, and Layer B is right in front of the camera. I need B’s anchor point to stick to A’s anchor point, no matter where layer A is positioned, without changing B’s…

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Thank you so much, Dan. It works perfectly.

Is there a way to get the width and height of a layer that is both pushed back in z-space, and scaled up? I don’t need the layer dimensions (thisLayer.width). I need the toComp size, or size of the bounding box. The layer is not rotated. Thanks in advance.

Just heard from Adobe on this issue:

“This is already fixed in the current AE Beta release (and will be included in the next shipping release).”

I have already filed a bug report, but I wanted to post here so that people who are experiencing crashing can understand why. I’ve spent many hours trying to figure out why older projects were crashing in After Effects 2020 when I would open certain comps. It turns out it’s the 3D Reference Axes.

If one or two of you have a minute, please try this…

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