[Walter Soyka]

I assume you’re trying using a script to write an expression into a property?

Two things I see in this code snippet:

1. It looks like you’re trying to reference a variable inside a string, and expecting it to evaluate; it will not. You need to separate out the string’s pieces and the variable, and concatenate them.

2. You’re assigning that result to a variable that you’re not actually using or explicitly returning. This will work in this case, but in some cases it can result in an expression error.

If you have this:

FACE[i].transform.position.expression = 'b=thisComp.layer(BEYER.name).transform.scale';

You probably want this instead:

FACE[i].transform.position.expression = 'thisComp.layer("' +  BEYER.name + '").transform.scale';

[Walter Soyka]

Yes! In Preferences > General, check the box for “Default spatial interpretation to linear.”

[Walter Soyka]

I wrote a quick little script to help with this a while back:

http://www.renderbreak.com/2015/01/keen-compmarkersmake/

[Walter Soyka]

Partitioning won’t have an impact on speed. It may be helpful for you personally, but it won’t make a difference to the computer.

Ae is pretty good about making sure its cache doesn’t go beyond the amount you set in preferences. If you have other app’s caches going to that same space, though, then a separate partition might make sense to prevent something from accidentally filling your system drive.

The external Thunderbolt drive is a good option, too, I just personally hate having to connect external disks to a laptop that’s meant to be portable.

[Walter Soyka]

What matters most for cache is speed. Ae measures the performance of the disk cache as it’s used, and when something is faster to retrieve from cache than it is to re-render, Ae caches it to disk. This means the faster your drive is, the more you can benefit from Ae’s cache system.

In the olden days of spinning rust hard drives, this almost always meant dedicating a disk to cache. Other apps competing for disk access and reads reduced cache performance, and Ae would be forced to cache less and re-render more.

With today’s solid-state drives, though, the access and read bottlenecks that mechanical disks faced are gone.

The system drive on a MacBook Pro M1 Max is 7.4 GB/s. That’s incredibly fast. External Thunderbolt SSDs will top out at around 2500-2800 MB/s. That’s also very fast, but the internal drive is still 2-3x faster.

As for SSD wear, it’s real, but do the math. I don’t know if Apple has published anything on write cycles or TBW (terabytes written) for their drives, but your sample “10,000 write cycles” means you could re-write the entire drive once every day for 27 years.

I personally use the NVMe system drive on my PC laptops for the cache.

[Walter Soyka]

I wonder if there’s something peculiar about that specific font? I don’t see it happening on every typeface.

If you drag the Character palette open a little further, you’ll see a control that lets you set the compositing order for the fills and strokes. The default is “Stroke over fill.” If you change the Fill color from transparent to black, set it for “Fill over stroke,” and double the stroke width.

You could use an Add or Screen blend mode to knock the black out of the text, leaving only the white outline, or you could use an Unmult effect.

[Walter Soyka]

There is probably not an easy fix — the keyer is driven by color. If the talent needs to feature the color green, they should be shot on a blue screen instead of a green screen.

You’re probably going to have to rotoscope. Maybe Rotobrush will help you?

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/roto-brush-refine-matte.html

Rotobrush might have trouble, too, if the boundary between green hair and green screen is indistinct. Then you’ll have to do your roto by hand.

[Walter Soyka]

Expressions can only affect the values of stopwatch-able properties. They can’t perform user/GUI actions like renaming items in the project panel.

[Walter Soyka]

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible. You can have multiple different (major) versions installed, but I don’t think you can have two instances of the same version installed.

[Walter Soyka]

Simply put, After Effects renders vertically (many layers, one frame at a time*), not horizontally (time). For each frame Ae renders, it will work from the bottom up to build the frame. The duration of your source materials does not impact your render times.

*The latest version of After Effects is capable of multi-frame rendering, but even though it’s processing several frames at a time, it’s still working layer by layer within each frame.