[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Federico, do you see damaged frames in rendered output as well, or just in viewport? If its a second option, try to look in the viewport with ‘Full Resolution’ and see if issue remains.

If it does not help, see if there are mismatches in framerates of footage vs comp. I had noticed something similar in the past.

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Jerel, you are right and not that much at the same time.

First things first, most authors on VH are not that much aligned with “easy customisation” features on scale. They tend to create beautifully looking products, with amazing promos, which in fact a lot too often takes unreasonable time resources to make somewhat scalable enough. Its ‘this kind of business’ out there, looking through my eyes.

Now on the other hand, making this adjustable through Illustrator is questionable. There are a bunch of different options to make customisation flexible on AE alone. Could you share your ideas how this customisation could be implemented through Illustrator? Keep in mind that updated files (especially, types) could cause a lot of issues with sizing.

Anyways, as a suggestions, I would recommend do not start editing template straight away, but look for ways to make it more flexible. Pre-compositing, structuring per your needs could help significantly in the long run, to begin with.

Happy to discuss this topic further, as this is somewhat I tend to be interested about.

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Eddie, not exactly in this fashion as plainly separate, though.

Expression wise, it would be achieved this way (where you could link each x and y with a slider, to have individual controls):
x = transform.scale[0];
y = transform.scale[1];

[x,y]

With that said, its a workaround, not a straightforward functionality.

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

And in addition to this, in case if you need specific number of decimals, (like one, or four, or whatever), add .toFixed(x), where x will generate amount of decimal values.

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Scott, nicely done! Just thought to give you heads up on this breakdown, as it seems you like to have hit a head into a wall for a while, until solution was found. Which, is much appreciated attitude, You, mountaineer! :)))

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Gavin, while I am not sure whether such script already exists, I don’t see a problem in creating one. Basically, it would require simply looping through the contents of shape layer, and where paths are found – set a keyframe at current time!

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Ricardo – expression won’t allow you to create new layers in the comp. You need scripting to make this possible to handle.

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After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Morgan, you are welcome.

Wow, now thats a breakdown, haha! Will try to cover what you asked about.

1. By not adding a slider to change xSize or ySize in the Essentials panel, you will not allow others to change it. So just keep it in an expression the way it is set currently.
2. Yes, any variable names used are optional and you could give them any name you want, yet I made them descriptive at some degree.
3. thisComp.layer(index+2) references a layer, which is 1 layer below. Meaning, since the line in the comp is with an index of ‘1’, result of 1+2 gets us a text layer and its keyframes. If, however, you plan to change the order or add extra layers in between, keep this in mind ☺
4. transform.position.key(x).time is setting variables for keyframes time values, where ‘x’ is a number of keyframe in layers position property.
5. inDelay and outDelay are just variables which allows you to make a ‘shift’ for key(1).time and key(3).time. Meaning, by changing these you will affect in and out times of the line.
6. animDur = 15 * thisComp.frameDuration; calculates 15frames in composition, based on time. In other words, we are multiplying frames by frame duration second wise, to get the length of animation in seconds. Seconds – because we are interpolating in seconds.
7. This link will answer questions about interpolation methods and why they are used here as is: https://expressions.aenhancers.com/interpolation.html

This should be it!

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Morgan, if I understood requirements correctly (that this should be controlled by keyframes of a text position keyframes), then this applied to ‘Shape’s size should be sufficient.

inDelay and outDelay are meant to control the gap from 1st and 3rd keyframes of position animation. Meaning, you could affect this linking it to a slider.
xSize and ySize are the sizes of line, pre-defined. You could also link them to slider to have a bit of extra control.

In case if its not what was needed, let me know and probably it could be tweaked to match the needs. Cheers.

xSize = 8; // Feel free to link these to sliders
ySize = 60 // Feel free to link these to sliders

startIn = thisComp.layer(index+2).transform.position.key(1).time;
startOut = thisComp.layer(index+2).transform.position.key(2).time;
endIn = thisComp.layer(index+2).transform.position.key(3).time;
endOut = thisComp.layer(index+2).transform.position.key(4).time;

inDelay = .5; // Feel free to link these to sliders
outDelay = .5; // Feel free to link these to sliders
animDur = 15 * thisComp.frameDuration;

if (time < startOut){
lineIn = startIn- inDelay;
lineOut = lineIn + animDur;
y = easeIn(time, lineIn, lineOut, 0, ySize);
} else if (time > endIn){
lineIn = endIn + outDelay;
lineOut = lineIn + animDur;
y = easeOut(time, lineIn, lineOut, ySize, 0);
} else{
y = ySize;
}

[xSize, y]

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Max – I honestly doubtful about making this into Essential graphics (if you mean that), due to a lot of expressions in relation to each other. Haven’t tried that myself, but with pretty complex logic onboard, I would lean more towards ‘not really’, unfortunately!

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.
Boxer – Dynamic Text Boxes Template with a Live Preview