[Walter Soyka]

Two ways to approach this.

1. Use an expression to offset the effective start time of the animation. Apply this expression to any animated properties in your first layer. Then, when you copy and paste it onto layers with different start times, Ae will play the animation when the layer begins, irrespective of when the keyframes occur on the time.

if (numKeys < 1) { value; } else {
	var animationStartTime = key(1).time;
	var animationStartDelay = thisLayer.inPoint - animationStartTime;
	valueAtTime(time - animationStartDelay);
}

2. You can quickly move all layers to the beginning of the comp by selecting them all, placing the current time indicator at the very first frame, and pressing the ‘[‘ key. Then, you can copy and paste and everything will line up at the first frame. To re-sequence the layers, select them all (first to last), then in the timeline window, right-click any of the layer bars, select Keyframe Assistant > Sequence layers…, and then click OK in Sequence Layers dialog (keeping ‘Overlay’ disabled).

[Walter Soyka]

You might look at using Essential Graphics to avoid having to pickwhip for expressions across comps.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-motion-graphics-templates.html

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/essential-graphics-panel

[Walter Soyka]

Nope, no obvious way to do what you want. With Ae’s render order putting Effects before Transforms, Set Matte just doesn’t work the way pretty much everyone wants it to.

Workflower might be worth a look:
https://aescripts.com/workflower/

[Walter Soyka]

Is everything there the same frame rate?

[Walter Soyka]

You could sequence all your icons, one frame each, in a precomp. Enable time-remapping for the precomp. Either use the CSV file to directly reference the frame number, or write an expression that translates the text inputs to the precomp’s time.

[Walter Soyka]

Enable time-remapping for your COMP1 layer inside COMP2, then apply this expression:

seedRandom(index, true);
random()*thisLayer.source.duration;

The first line tells Ae to use the layer’s index as the seed for the random number generator, and sets “timeless” to true, meaning the random numbers returned will not change from frame-to-frame. The second line picks a random number from 0 to 1, then scales it to the duration of your original precomp.

[Walter Soyka]

You can’t really do that — effects and blend modes are pretty different!

But depending on what you’re trying to build and standardize, you might want to take a look at an Essential Graphics workflow for your team. The most common use is probably authoring in After Effects and executing in Premiere, but the workflow is also very useful exclusively in After Effects:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-motion-graphics-templates.html

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/essential-graphics-panel

[Walter Soyka]

Your code is really close to working! You should remove the square brackets around “my_project_file” in the last line. Square brackets in JavaScript indicate arrays, and app.project.save() is expecting a File object.

One other gotcha that could prevent this from working: the folder that you’re saving the file to must exist before you call app.project.save(). You validate the path and create any directories necessary in your code somewhere before the final line.

[Walter Soyka]

You’ll either have to do this by hand, or create multiple layers and link their properties with valueAtTime() expressions.

These resources might be helpful to you:

https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/follow-the-leader.html

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/time-expression-after-effects

[Walter Soyka]

1) If the script is installed in one of Ae’s default application or user script folders, it will appear as a menu item. That means you can call it as such:

app.executeCommand(app.findMenuCommandId("myGreatScript.jsx"));

2) If you know where the file sits on disk, you can call tell Ae’s scripting engine to evaluate it:

$.evalFile("C:/path/to/myGreatScript.jsx");