The memory requirements for this project are huge. Ae will need 1.4 GB of RAM for each frame of each layer, just to hold the images.

Can you reduce those source images in size at all? Or can your other app output them as vector graphics instead of PNGs? Or break them into pieces and tile them if you don’t need to see the whole thing on-screen at…

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That # symbol indicates a guide layer — a non-rendering layer that you can see in your viewer, but that does not appear in renders or downstream comps. It’s super-useful if you want to see how an element aligns or composites with something else, but don’t want it to accidentally render if you forget to turn it off.

You can toggle it on or off f…

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FWIW, I think Roland’s method of obscuration is production-ready and significantly more useful for hiding how your custom expression code actually works.

John’s method is extremely clever, but you can extract the hidden comp name from the current implementation with just two lines of code, and then the user can see everything you’ve done.

I think…

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I guess if you don’t need any modern JavaScript features in your expressions and can get away with using the legacy ExtendScript expression engine, you can use Adobe’s dev tools to make .jsxbin blobs for all your expressions (and even bake key frame data, wrap them in expressions, and save them as .jsxbin blobs), then in-line them with eval() cal…

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Unfortunately, there are no features in After Effects that let you lock down a project the way you’re describing. Even MOGRTs can be reopened and inspected in After Effects.

If you want to try to keep your code secret, you might consider obfuscating your expressions — intentionally making them harder to read and understand. You can find a few fre…

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Wow, there’s a blast from the past!

Puget Systems has been refining a modern Ae benchmark that stresses different subsystems in Ae over the last few years. They’ve just done a big overhaul on the benchmark and their scoring system, and they’re looking for new data if you’re interested in running…

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I wrote a quick script that does exactly this a few years back:

http://www.renderbreak.com/2014/07/after-effects-script-keen_3dlayertools/

Not the precomp itself. Apply this to each layer within the precomp that you want to appear randomly. (As a shortcut, you can apply it to the first layer, then copy the opacity property, select all the other layers, and paste.)

Jessica, this will replace your previous code. Apply just the expression I wrote to the Opacity property of any layer(s) you want to have randomly appear.

If I’m understanding right and you’d like a layer to randomly appear and stay visible, you could apply this expression to its Opacity property. I’ve tried to make the code as approachable as possible, but I’m happy to answer any questions:

// set the earliest and latest possible appearance times, in seconds
var minTime = 0;
var maxTime = 5;
// use the…

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After Effects loves fast SSDs for its cache. In Ae’s preferences, make sure “Enable Disk Cache” is on, choose a folder on your fast SSD for the cache, and set its size as high as you are comfortable.

As you work and preview, Ae will store rendered layers and frames in the disk cache, and then it will read back those stored layers and frames for any…

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You might try holding down the Shift key while opening your project. This will open the project without opening (and therefore attempting to render) any comps in timeline or viewer panels.

From there, you can open comps with Caps Lock engaged to prevent the viewer from rendering.

Maybe then, you can narrow down which comp and which specific layer is…

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I think a physical simulation is the best approach for a problem like this.

Try Newton maybe?
https://aescripts.com/newton/

Yes, exporting to MP4 via After Effects is a new (again) feature in a recent release. It’s pretty great, and we use it often!

I can really only think of two reasons why you might prefer using Media Encoder for your MP4s:

1. You have to deliver a very specific format, or your material and format would benefit from multi-pass encoding. This can help…

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You’ve already identified the major pieces of this animation: setting the opacity (and maybe the blend mode), and animating the position.

You can use shape layers to create the triangles. Add a shape layer, then add a “Polystar Path” and a “Fill.” Set the Polystar Path type to “Polygon” instead of “Star,” use 3 points, and finally, add a Round…

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A lot of the old conventional wisdom around how to use the cache was etched in our minds when all our drives were spinning rust. It doesn’t apply anymore.

With After Effects in particular, the cache works best when the cache works fast.

Put your cache on your fastest drive, irrespective of where the OS, program, and project file. For example, if you…

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And for me, when I’m hiring, these are some things I’m looking for. This is a ranked list, with my highest hiring priorities at the top:

1. Attitude (why work with someone you can’t get along with?)
2. Ability to collaborate (with clients, with other agencies, with other team members)
3. Ability to communicate (we can’t sell ideas we can’t explain)
4. Working…

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How might you build this in Ae from scratch?

How might you animate this?

How might you adapt this to other layouts?

How might you use this in conjunction with other elements in a design?

I think your problem is that your text uses Unicode encodings, but something somewhere between pbpaste, stdin, and ExtendScript is treating the string as ASCII.

The best workaround I can think of is to explicitly tell pbpaste to use a Unicode encoding, dump it to a file, and explicitly read the file back in with a Unicode encoding.

Sample code:

//…

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If you are required to deliver interlaced video, you will get better results if you render interlaced video from After Effects.

After you add your comp to the render queue, click its render settings (“Best Settings,” by default) and change the “Field render” option from “Off” to “Upper field first” to match your delivery requirements.

Looks like you’re on an older version of After Effects. It uses a very outdated MP4 encoder, and it’s imposing some format constraints on your output — including a maximum horizontal resolution of 320 pixels!

I’d suggest rendering to an intermediate codec (such as with the Lossless output module), and then uses Media Encoder to create your MP4 from there.

There are a few things I can think of that might answer your question:

Firstly, 2D layers won’t show in orthographic views (top, front, left, etc.), but they do show in camera views (although, of course, they do not react to the 3D scene).

Secondly, if you are catching an image layer at its edge, you won’t be able to see it. That’s because the layer…

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You need to use an output module preset with an alpha channel, which will encode and preserve the transparency.

Try either the High Quality with Alpha (ProRes 4444) or Lossless with Alpha preset.

Personally, I’d suggest ProRes 4444 for almost all cases — it’s visually indistinguishable from a lossless codec, but significantly smaller on disk.

Hector might be on the right track. What if you disable Edit > Preferences > Display > “Hardware accelerate composition, layer, and footage panels”?

Also, I like Parsec better than RDP or TeamViewer for remote control — might be worth a look. Very responsive, great visual quality, easy to use.

That’s strange! The normal Ae behavior is to rename the asset when you do a footage replacement.

When you’re replacing the asset in the project panel, do you perhaps have “Import as sequence” checked in the file selection dialog box?

I think the value graph is a lot easier to understand intuitively than the speed graph. Some great notes here:
https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/graph-editor-after-effects

My whole team uses Flow from Aescripts to help keep our motion curves consistent:
https://aescripts.com/flow/

You can only add expressions to properties that can be animated. No stopwatch, no expression.

As a workaround, you might consider multiple layers, each one with a different “Based on” value, and link their opacity to your dropdown so that only one is actually visible.

Time Stretch is non-destructive, but it can be hard to find.

If you right-click on any of the column headers in the timeline panel (i.e., where it says “Layer Name”, “Mode”, “Track Matte”, “Parent & Link”, etc.), it will open a context menu. Click Columns, then Stretch.

This will add a column to your timeline display called Stretch. Anything that’s…

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Trapcode Form is a good tool to create looks like this:
https://www.maxon.net/en/red-giant/trapcode/form

This is pretty straightforward to script. Please note I’ve done only limited testing, so please make sure it works the way you expect before you rely on it in production.

This script will step through your project, remove footage items that are not used in any comps, and report back a list of what it did. It’ll leave empty folders intact.

It will…

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Hi, John! Your intuition is correct. For your SETUP, you want that one big comp so you can work spatially across screens.

How you actually OUTPUT your work depends on the video engineering and playback system requirements. (And those ideally depend on the creative requirements.)

If your videos will only ever sync-roll, playback might actually prefer…

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Unfortunately, I don’t think the video linked above will help. It’s about importing CSVs as data sources into Ae, but there’s no way to get them to markers there.

This is totally doable with scripting, though. In fact, a quick search turns up this tool:
http://www.dispersiondesign.com/products/ae_scripts/import_markers/

I haven’t used it, so I can’t…

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I can’t remember when Ae didn’t work like this, but you don’t normally run into this because of another special case — when you create a comp from a file, Ae drops the dot and file extension in the newly-created comp name. Maybe you’re seeing this if the assets are named such that they don’t have file extensions?

Anyway, here’s a quick script that…

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Text layers, text properties, and text documents can be a little tricky. You can read all about it in the docs here:

https://ae-scripting.docsforadobe.dev/other/textdocument.html

In the meantime, try this for your script:

var compName = app.project.activeItem.name;
var textLayer = app.project.activeItem.layers.addText(compName);
var textProp =…

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Don’t ever use the numbers (i.e., 12212) directly; use the enumerated value name instead (CTScript.CT_ROMAN_SCRIPT). That way, if the numbers ever change from one version of Ae to the next, your script won’t break.

The numbers are enumerated values. (After Effects uses a lot of these.) Here’s some documentation:

https://ae-scripting.docsforadobe.dev/other/fontobject.html#fontobject-writingscripts

This is a limitation of how effects are able to access other layers. Track mattes are not effects, and as you have noted, they behave differently.

As of Ae 2023, you can select which layer functions as the matte. (In previous versions of Ae, the matte layer had to be the layer above the layer to be matted.) This means that you can easily reuse…

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Broadly speaking, you’ll want to first set up the effect you’re looking for. Maybe you want to use the Exposure effect, or masked solid with a blend mode, or something to create the lighting effect you want.

Then, you’ll want to experiment a little to understand the relationship between the brightness in the input image and the values they should…

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It looks like there are hidden macOS metadata files in those folders — one hidden file per EXR file, that starts with a period. They’re showing up in the file browser dialog, and you’re accidentally trying to import them instead of the real EXR files.

In the Import window, scroll halfway down and make sure you’re importing the EXR files (the ones…

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Tom’s right on — Ae’s shape layers and text layers are always continuously rasterized at the size of the comp. When you apply Solid Composite to a shape layer or a text layer, it will always fill the screen.

Very interesting! I’ll leave Ae running without a project open for a few hours over here and see what memory use is like.

What OS and what version of Ae are you running? I’d also be curious about third-party plugins & extensions you may have installed?

Makes perfect sense, and what Andy describes is exactly what you want to do.

The left square bracket key — [ — will move all selected layers on the timeline so their in point snaps to the playhead (called the current time indicator in After Effects). The right square bracket key — ] — will do the same, but with the out point.

Move the current…

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Does it make a difference if you clear your disk cache?

I have a theory that Ae spends too much time managing the cache when it’s full or close to full, but I haven’t fully tested it.

Do you have Multiframe Rendering enabled (in Ae’s preferences, under Memory & Performance).

Do you have see a difference rendering in Ae with the Render Queue versus rendering in Media Encoder?

What does the new-ish Composition Profiler show you about the comp?
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/composition-profiler.html

Tools like Dataclay’s Templater are built for this:
https://dataclay.com/templater/

In Javascript, square brackets indicate arrays (lists) and curly braces indicate blocks of code (such as would follow an if/else statement. You are using square brackets where you should be using curly braces.

Try this:

var red = [215,68,63,255] / 255;
var black = [51,58,55,255] / 255;
if (transform.xPosition > 960) {
	red;
} else {
	black;
}

Are you able to preview the timeline at full resolution without it failing?

Is there anything specific that happens around the time on the timeline where the export fails?

Does it make a difference if you clear the cache before exporting? (Edit > Purge > All memory and disk cache…)

Yes, you can use the “Create Nulls from Path” script included with After Effects. Find it under the Window menu.

You were really close with your original expression. You really just needed move your setText() call down from line 3 to the end of the expression, and use it to show reveal instead of parentText.

I cleaned up the code a little bit — using meaningful variable names is good practice to help future you understand what past you wrote — and I rewrote…

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