[Paul Roper]

Is that 👆 the oldest post on this site?! Over 20 years ago!

[Paul Roper]

I realise this post was from some time ago, but I have a similar question, but simpler:
All I need to do, is get the index of a marker AT THE CURRENT TIME, not that fairly annoying/useless “nearestKey” thing, which changes whenever the current time is kinda near the marker, not ON the marker. I’m guessing the (somewhat convoluted) way of going about it would be:
1. Get the TIME of the nearestKey

2. When the current time >= the nearestKey’s time, use that nearestKey’s index

…or something. Basically, all I want to do is be able to control the appearance, word-by-word, of a text layer, and be able to trigger that by hammering in a load of markers (easily done with a text animator/opacity/based on words). But getting the “nearestKey” to be “exactKey” is a right pain!
Any ideas/help would be greatly appreciated, please!

~ Paul

UPDATE: From a bit more hunting around here, I found something by @Meng Zhiqun, and pinched a bit of expression from there. It generates an error if the time is before the first marker, but I can live with that:

n = 0;
if (marker.numKeys > 0) {
    n = marker.nearestKey(time).index;
    if (marker.key(n).time > time) {
        n--;
    }
marker.key(n).index
}
else {0}

All seems quite convoluted to just get the index of the current marker!

[Paul Roper]

Oh yes – so there is!

Thanks for sharing your bottomless well of expressions knowledge to us mere mortals, Dan!

[Paul Roper]

Any thoughts, anyone? I’ve now finished that job, but I’m still curious how to do it, if anyone has any ideas they feel like sharing!?

[Paul Roper]

…and my next question, almost predictably, is:
How can I make points only appear within countries (i.e. not the sea) of my map? I know I could liberally scatter a load of nulls in my comp over the land masses, but I feel there should be a way to tell Plexus “Create points randomly where the alpha of this layer > 0”.

[Paul Roper]

As ever, Dan, you are an absolute hero of After Effects! The world of motion graphics people collectively bows down before your expressioneering greatness!

[Paul Roper]

Continuing this conversation (from 6 years ago!), I’m looking for a similar way to start playing a layer when it reaches a marker. Here’s my situation:
I have a comp about 2 mins. long. At about 30 intervals (not regular) along the timeline, I want a short (finger click) sound to play. I could just put 30 layers of the sound in the comp and drag them to the appropriate time – but that just seems messy! So I was wondering if there’s a neater, marker-driven approach. I was thinking something like this:
1. Null layer with markers where I want the clicks.
2. AIFF sound layer, with an expression on it to set its time remapping to 0 each time a marker on the Null layer is encountered, so it plays from the start.
Might that work?

Thanks in advance for any help!!

[Paul Roper]

“Sorry about that.” Yes, Dan. you should be sorry. That’s not what we pay you for!

I read somewhere recently that the world’s motion graphics community would completely collapse if Dan Ebberts ever stopped helping us all! And I absolutely agree!

We all love you and owe you MANY hours/days saved throughout our careers!

[Paul Roper]

THANK YOU!
I was kinda on the right lines!
Strangely, the “parseInt(thisProperty.propertyGroup(3).name,10) – 1” didn’t work, but if I split it into a couple of lines:

var x = parseInt(thisProperty.propertyGroup(3).name,10);

x-1

…it DID work.

[Paul Roper]

So, I’m back again, several years after my last post. I’m now looking to do something similar, but with text animators. All I want to do is get the name of the specific text animator. Like this:
I add an Animator. AE, by default, calls it “Animator 1”. I want this animator to affect line x of my text, so I rename it from “Animator 1” to, say “3” because I want it to affect line 3. I then put an expression in the Range Selector (which I’ve already set to Index and Lines). I assume it would look something like:

text.animator(parseInt(thisProperty.propertyGroup(1).name)

or

parseInt(text.animator(thisProperty.propertyGroup(1).name))

…but that doesn’t work. Any suggestions, anyone? (And by “anyone”, I obviously mean The Undisputed Genius of Expressions Dan Ebberts! ).