[Perry Kroll]

Works like a charm! Crappy footage now slightly less crappy. I also blurred the matte layer a bit which seemed to work better for my situation.

[Perry Kroll]

I know this thread is really old, but I’m adding this in because it’s the first thread that comes up in Google for a problem that I think a lot of people are having.

When importing AI files to After Effects, the colors are coming out shifted.

The solution, which I found after much digging, is:

Open the file in Illustrator.

Select everything in your document

Choose Edit > Edit Colors > Convert to CMYK.

This will convert spot colors to process colors.

[Perry Kroll]

I think what you’re asking for is to get the position of a null that is a child of another null.

Try this.

Of course you may need to adapt for Z to make it work for Particular, but that’s at least a start.

lay = (pickwhip the child null layer) ;
pos = lay.toWorld( lay.anchorPoint);

[Perry Kroll]

velocityAtTime(time-thisComp.frameDuration/2)[0] does the trick!

I had already tried an absolute value.

Thanks for the insight!

[Perry Kroll]

Curiously, they’re just normal linear keyframes.

Here’s what it looks like. You can see that the “show post-expression graph” result shows a positive value, yet the property value post-expression is still 0.

In this example I’m just doing a very simple expression to take the velocity of of the first dimension on position and put it on the opacity property

thisLayer.position.velocity[0]

[Perry Kroll]

You deserve a medal for posting this. Thank you.

[Perry Kroll]

Roland – this is genius!

I knew about the Word Processor preset but I would never have thought of scaling the underscore character. I can even colorize it. This is a brilliant hack. Thank you!

[Perry Kroll]

Thanks!

I wonder if I could use Text Anarchy to put a distinctly colored (but not otherwise correct) cursor on the screen in the right place, and then use the sampleImage() technique to find that cursor based on color and position my own cursor there… That might be a faster process.

I also wonder how easy it would be to write a plugin that could be applied to a null layer, and would let the user define the text layer to watch, and then the plugin would just move the null layer (through an expression on said layer?) to the right place, as a live process. Do plugin effects have access to that kind of info? If so, I could try appealing to the folks who code for aescripts and the like and see if anyone wants to throw this together. I feel like there’d be a lot of demand of a simple cursor animation plugin.

[Perry Kroll]

Good call on changing the font to the Mac UI font (Lucida Grande). That does get me closer. Still not a 100% match, but it’s progress.

I’d still be way off on the iOS cursor which is really thick.

It doesn’t need to be 100% accurate, but the closer we can get the better. I can’t say too much about the project. It’s a feature film with a LOT of UI that’s supposed to look like real-life found footage recordings and stuff. I also find myself doing iOS simulations all the time for iOS app ads or pitch videos, and I usually just animate that cursor by hand, so this would have applications in those projects as well if I can crack it.

[Perry Kroll]

Yeah, unfortunately as I mentioned in my first post above Text Anarchy doesn’t do the job. Unless I am missing something it doesn’t allow for full control of the look of the cursor. For example, the | character it lets you use is is the wrong height and has the wrong vertical spacing to look like a real cursor, and on iOS the cursor is a bit thicker, etc. I’m not sure that any modern UI uses an underline…