[Paul Roper]

…So probably about 5% of them must be from me!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I restarted Firefox and it works fine.

Feature request submitted!

Just out of interest, how many After Effects feature requests per day does Adobe get?

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Huh. Looks like the AE wishlist web page has broken. I just get a page with nothing but “413 Header Length too Large” on it, whether I go via Todd’s link or from within AE.

I’ve just checked again and it works in Safari – maybe my Firefox is being dodgy.

[Paul Roper]

Yesterday, while investigating some vector maths, I came across the lookAt function in the AE help PDF (reading the manual?Wwho’d have thought it?!). It might also be of use to you, Jamie.

Here’s the cromulent section copied from the help:

lookAt(fromPoint, atPoint)
Return type: Array [3].

Argument type: fromPoint and atPoint are Arrays [3].

The argument fromPoint is the location in world space of the layer you want to orient. The argument atPoint is the point in world space you want to point the layer at. The return value can be used as an expression for the Orientation property, making the z axis of the layer point at atPoint. This method is especially useful for cameras and lights. If you use this expression on a camera, turn off auto-orientation. For example, this expression on the Orientation property of a spot light makes the light point at the anchor point of layer number 1 in the same composition: lookAt(position, thisComp.layer(1).position)

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Yeah – I thought I’d try posting it here, hoping that I’d get a simple answer along the lines of “shift-command-8 changes the preview quality”. But as I was typing it, I experimented with various options and it kinda grew out of all proportion. So yeah, I’ll repost it on the expressions (aka Dan Ebberts) forum.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

The RAM preview may have been faster depending on your preview settings – maybe it was set on Fast Draft or Half Resolution, in which case the resulting movie would not look as glorious as the full render.

But there are so many effects and layers on that project, it will always be slow to render on even the fastest machines.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I think your problem is that it’s just a hideously over-nested-comp project. There are comps in comps in comps – a ridiculously huge amount of layers to achieve something that just doesn’t warrant it.

Without remaking the project from scratch, I think you’re just going to have to put up with long render times. It would probably take longer to remake it than to wait for the render. Make sure you do a super-low res. render to check everything works before setting off your big render.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Nothing? No suggestions?

[Paul Roper]

I suspected as much. Thanks (as always!) Dan.

[Paul Roper]

Did you solve your text size problem?

While you can’t directly access the font size from an expression (as far as I know), if you add a scale animator (from the pop-up menu on the text layer, choose Animate > Scale) you can then add an expression in there. You can get the length (in characters) of the text using:

thisComp.layer(“replace this with your text layer name”).text.sourceText.length

You’ll need to do a fair amount of maths to adapt the scale to the correct value, but I hope this brief response might help as a starting point!