[Noel Powell]

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 it to be accurate. I am using valueAtTime(), and customizability through controls is important to me, so there’s not a lot of keyframing. Typically when I’m testing speed, I change the random seed and then move my render area far up the timeline to an area that’s not cached, then immediately start timing it. I guess I like this method because it gives me an average speed of all the frames. I feel like the Render Time column should work that way, but it doesn’t appear to.

[Noel Powell]

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 layers with identical expressions, and the render times for each layer varies wildly – from layer to layer, as well as from frame to frame. And the total Frame Render Time is all over the place as well, ranging from 20ms to 1 sec per frame. Timing a preview of a 10-second section at least gives me the results I expect after making changes/improvements to the code.

[Noel Powell]

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 properties still change. Is it treated differently when it’s actually previewing or rendering, than when scrubbing through?

[Noel Powell]

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

[Noel Powell]

Great, I’ll do that. Thanks

[Noel Powell]

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 statement to “>”, and it seems to do what I need now.

Thanks again.

[Noel Powell]

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 the time – I hope the expression can help someone else out.

[Noel Powell]

Thank you so much, Dan. It works perfectly.

[Noel Powell]

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).”

[Noel Powell]

That’s perfect! Thank you so much for your time, Dan!

Creation Effects – Creative tools for After Effects: https://CreationEffects.com