[Paul Roper]

Thanks Dan!

One more thing – this script processes ALL my comps. How can I limit it to the SELECTED comps? (I’m guessing it’d be a change to the app.project.numItems bit).

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Well that’s an amusing coincidence – a search brought me to this page, only to see that I’d already commented on it last year!

I tried that script again, and found that to change the start frame number of a bunch of 29.97fps comps, entering “29.97” in the framerate field made no difference, but entering “25” successfully changed the start frame numbers to “1”. Odd.

(And I still cannot see the point of 29.97fps in the 21st century!)

[Paul Roper]

Hmmmm….I seem to have fixed it, by making it evaluate every second pixel. I changed i++ to i=i+2 and now I can render a preview faster than realtime! Weird. I’d predict that doing this would make it evaluate twice as fast, not hundreds of times faster!

[Paul Roper]

By “whole flame is added”, I assume you mean that you have added the flame yourself, presumably in After Effects. The Turbulent Displace effect should work to add a reasonable shimmy to it. Make sure you animate the Evolution or the Offset (Turbulence) values.

[Paul Roper]

Hello,

What exactly do you mean by “When I try to link the media by locating the AE file it doesn’t connect.”? I’m having a problem where Premier has forgotten links to some comps, even though I have not changed filenames nor file locations, but I did update AE to a newer version (both Premiere and AE are CC2015).

When I do Link Media and select the AE project, then click OK, nothing happens…the file selector dialog box just sits there. If I double-click the AE project, nothing happens. I just have to cancel the whole thing.

Is this the same as what you’re seeing?

[Paul Roper]

Me too. I think I’ll just give up on Dynamic Link – a couple of years on and it’s still infested with bugs.

[Paul Roper]

Continuing…

So, I added100-thisComp.layer("note").transform.opacityto the musical note’s opacity, and it kind of worked. The only problem I now have is that the keyframes generated from the MIDI data do not fall exactly on whole frames. I increased my comp’s frame rate to 99 (the max. value), altered my Echo Time to -1/99 and it sort of works, but the echo effect is causing some weird ghosting of the notes. I suspect the notes are not on screen for long enough.

Aha!
I found that the script had added two keyframes, a tiny fraction of a frame apart. Maybe it was trying to cram two notes into one slider. I changed the comp’s frame rate back to 25fps, deleted these second notes’ KFs, slid the remaining keyframes to snap to whole frames, adjusted the Echo Time back to -1/25, and lo and behold, it’s all sorted!

[Paul Roper]

Hmmmm….getting there. I found this on the AE help pages (who’d have thunk it?!):

The following expression, when written on an Opacity property with keyframes, ignores the keyframe values and uses only the placement of the keyframes in time to determine where a flash should occur: d = Math.abs(time – nearestKey(time).time); easeOut(d, 0, .1, 100, 0)

So I put that on a layer’s opacity, threw in some random keyframes, and indeed, it ignores the KF’s values and makes the opacity pulse when it encounters a keyframe. To remove the pulse, I just changed it to the following, so if there’s a KF, the opacity is 0%, and if there’s no KF, the opacity is 100%:

d = Math.abs(time - nearestKey(time).time);
d*10000

[Paul Roper]

Thank you Dan – it worked perfectly!

You are, as ever, The Man!

[Paul Roper]

Having experienced a bug in AE where it changes a comp’s start frame from 1 to 2, I searched around and found this script. It works perfectly for 29.97fps comps, but does nothing for 30fps comps, which is odd. Running the script on a 30fps comp with a start frame of 2 achieves nothing.

Unfortunately I do not have anything constructive to add; there seems to be no reason why setting the displayStartTime to 1/30 (in a 30fps comp) would not work just as well as setting it to 1/29.97 (in a 29.97fps comp). I have a personal loathing of 29.97fps and think the world would be a much better place if we abolished it completely!