[Tom Szymanski]

Gotcha. I batched a bunch of them like you said, just being a little bit more of a machine myself with the shortcut keys. That cut down on the time a good bit.

I can see where highlighting a bunch fo them might confuse the autocrop part.

Would there be a way to do it as a cycle?

(not written in scripting because I’m not very good at it yet)

Open project / folder comp X+0
select none (I’ve realized having any layers selected confused autocrop)
Autocrop
Save as frame

Then
Open project / folder comp X+1
(repeat)
Open project / folder comp X+2

I don’t know how to stop it though.

For a different project like this I wanted to color each letter in a word in a certain order and built it so that there’s a slider for how many colors to pick from (since sometimes it was 4 colors, sometimes 6, sometimes up to 11) and when I adjusted the “how many colors” slider it told the text to start cycle over again after X number of colors. (all of which I got a lot of great help from some folks on Creative Cow)

But can a script ask the user for input? Like could the script say “How many comps do you want to process?” and you put in the number and then the X+1 through whatever number was typed in idea might work.

The new scripting stuff has me thinking about a lot of this in some fun ways. I appreciate the mental gymnastics.

[Tom Szymanski]

Awesome, thanks for the help!

It gets me a lot closer and I appreciate it. I’ll try it out this weekend and I’m curious to dig into the scripting you used to understand it better.

Thank you!

[Tom Szymanski]

Darn. I think you’re right. Sorry!

[Tom Szymanski]

I was trying to do something similar. This might help. It’ll copy everything in the Character window.

Put this in the Expression: Source Text, and point it to the one you’re pulling the style from.
parentStyle = thisComp.layer(“Parent”).text.sourceText.style

Or this one if you want the style driven from another comp:
parentStyle = comp(“Other Comp”).layer(“Other parent”).text.sourceText.style

Dan Ebberts was an awesome help with my project that was similar!
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/227/45747

[Tom Szymanski]

Thank you so much for the help! Been looking through your youtube videos. Great design and I like the data-driven aspect. I’d like to get into some more of that at some point, but for what I do there’s not as much call for it. But very slick.

Your scripting video was a good starting point to understanding it, and I can’t wait to learn more. I’ve been just beginning to dabble with that.

1. Yes, all comps can be in a single folder in the project panel.
2. Exported images can go to wherever, the desktop or a renders folder somewhere. Moving them afterwards shouldn’t be a problem.
3. Comp names for this, since they’re driving what the text is inside a project, tend to be just simple text like “classroom”, “teacher”, “teachers”, sometimes down to just numbers “1” etc.
(from the scripting video you made – maybe doing an array like from comp _ to _ with which lines they are in the project panel would work. I could put the other comps that don’t need to be rendered at the bottom after all of the rendered ones, or just in a different folder).
4. I’m using the plain “Auto Crop” option.

I’m psyched for the help, and I look forward to getting to learn more!
Thanks! Tom

[Tom Szymanski]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the help!
I have autocrop 3 (https://aescripts.com/auto-crop/) and I mapped it to a option+q.

1. Could be by folder, could be by clicking and highlighting, open to suggestions on this – I have an expression which makes the comp name the same as the text so I kind of need to be able to have the comp names be what they are.
2. About 300+ comps
3. .png is what I’d prefer – just a single frame,

Watching some of your tutorials now. Thanks – looks like good stuff!

[Tom Szymanski]

Hi David,

What software are you using to write scripts in? It looked like there was something in creative cloud, but I’ve been having a hard time finding it. I think I’m missing something super remedial to get started – like where you write them, how to save them, where to put them, and how to activate or use them in AE. From there, what I’ve seen in some tutorials has made sense.

Thanks!

[Tom Szymanski]

Thank you Dan! I appreciate the help!

[Tom Szymanski]

Thank you SO SO SO much! That worked great! I opened up your project and could see it and it made more sense.

One thing which you did that I didn’t notice at first was, the last color in the order you made it

if ( textIndex%4 == 0) 100
else 0

Where I was expecting…

if ( textIndex%4 == 4) 100
else 0

I was following your directions pretty well up until me skipping that part and the quickie project you send gave me something concrete to look at.

You’re a LIFESAVER. I had to do like 100 of these manually with various words and it took forever!

Thank you SO much!

[Tom Szymanski]

Thanks Andrei!

I think I almost have it.

On Step 2, adding “Fill” to text animator…sorry, I think I’m missing something, not in the syntax, in where to apply the expression. Where do I add the expression exactly? I’m not seeing a text animator, or maybe I’m thinking of something else.

Thanks!