[Ryan Hill]

Oh, yeah. I hadn’t even considered that might be what he wants, to make it into a .swf animation.

You can still use bitmap still images, rather than vector art, but the restriction on filters is true, and you can’t use 3D.

This talks a little about it:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/tierney_jim/flashing_ccow/flashing_ccow.htm
Also this:
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WSDE67F770-09B6-4f4b-AF9B-9E577311067A.html

[Ryan Hill]

I think also you can use Math.PI instead of 3.1415…

Plus, if you’re not up on your trigonometry, there’s plenty of ways you could rig this up by parenting one layer to another layer and then using .toWorld() to get the position of it.

[Ryan Hill]

I’ve exported .FLVs straight from After Effects without an intermediate format.

[Ryan Hill]

I think it looks similar to this:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/hansen_jaysen/growing.php

With a dozen bunches of leaves for each tree being scaled up simultaneously. If I were to try this, I’d probably use expressions to tie the scale and rotation of each bunch of leaves to a single slider. They might also have some bunches that are parented to the first collection of bunches.

So, you’ll spend a lot of time constructing the tree, but once you have it, you can animate it pretty easily. If you’re doing a lot of trees, you might want to add some other properties that can be adjusted so you can make each tree slightly different just by changing some values.

[Ryan Hill]

Time remapping, of course.

But I also only figured out the easiest way to do this from something I learned here. If you right-click on a keyframe you have the option to “select all keyframes to the right.”

So you add two keyframes, one second apart, for a start point and end point. Then you can use the above trick, and the ctrl-click unselect to select the start point and any keyframes to the right, (but unselect the end point) and move them as a unit, until your start point is after your end point. By moving them as a unit, you make sure the speed goes back to normal after your rewind.

[Ryan Hill]

Based on your example, you’re not asking for the current value, but the previous value, in the sense of the value that this same expression generated at a different time, so you can make a cumulative effect.

My understanding is that AE doesn’t like to derive a property from itself on the basis that it could lead to circular reasoning.

Here’s a similar problem where someone created a While loop to sum all the values from the start to the current time:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/227/10015

It isn’t referencing the result of its own expression, but another expression, but the results are similar to what you want.

[Ryan Hill]

I got it to work. Instead of trying to render the files directly from After Effects, I imported all my videos into Premiere and used Dynamic Link to send them to Encore. And that solved whatever formatting problem or something and it successfully encoded first try.

[Ryan Hill]

And yet I’ve re-rendered from After Effects in 5 different formats and it hasn’t had any problems yet.

[Ryan Hill]

Because of another “encode failed” thread I found on here, I’ve confirmed that all the files are contained in a path with short folder and file names with no spaces.

[Ryan Hill]

So I can export a short 15 second .mov file from AE and it encodes fine. If I export the full version of the same movie using all the same settings, and it fails about 2/3 of the way through. There’s 800 and 700 gigs free on either drive, so it’s not running out of space.