[Walter Soyka]

I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand the visual you’re describing. Could you show a couple of quick storyboard images?

[Walter Soyka]

This is a problem that seems like it should be easy, but it’s actually quite difficult to do automatically/procedurally with expressions for an arbitrary shape.

I think the fastest solve is probably to use an expression to position your follower object along the path. This will be expressed as a percentage, where 0 is the first point on the path and 100 is the last. Then you can pretty quickly animate that completion to match the bar’s position by hand.

See attached sample project for a reference and let me know if you have any questions.

Graph-Tracer.aep 86 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

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[Walter Soyka]

A few troubleshooting ideas:

1. Hold SHIFT while opening the project. Instead of opening the project with all timeline/viewer windows in their previous state, Ae will open the project with all timeline/viewer windows closed. If your problem is being caused by a crash at render time that is being triggered by the current frame in the currently active sequence, this will help you get around it.
2. Open an older version of the project. Hopefully, you have other copies of the project — either from autosave, from previous AME encodes, or from the best practice of using Increment and Save frequently. Some tools like Time Machine or Dropbox can also help you recover a previous version of the file, even if you haven’t been manually versioning.
3. Import the project instead of opening it. If an AEP has become corrupted, importing the project into a blank, new project can sometimes help, or at least recover parts of the project up to the point of corruption.
4. Reset your preferences. Hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Cmd+Opt+Shift (macOS) while launching Ae to reset your preference files to their default state. This is a good troubleshooting step for general Ae weirdness.
5. Try opening the project without the footage where Ae expects it. If Ae is crashing trying to load a piece of media, disconnecting that media might help. Disconnecting the drive that contains the footage, temporarily renaming folders that hold the project’s footage, or moving footage items to another folder will all force those assets to go missing when Ae loads the project. Then you can reconnect them in batches and try to narrow down the offending item.

[Walter Soyka]

Another big vote from me for using Overload as your bridge from Ai to Ae — it’s fantastic!

But stepping back to the original visual, I’d suggest looking into a system like Trapcode Form for dealing with grids of particles. Form allows you to animate the system as a whole rather than having to directly manipulate each individual dot as its own entity.

https://www.redgiant.com/products/trapcode-form/

[Walter Soyka]

Working in log the whole way through will certainly avoid the color transforms, but please note that using all the tools and blend modes will feel very different.

[Walter Soyka]

You can’t customize that — but I’d recommend avoiding the menu altogether. You can use a plugin like Quick Menu (https://aescripts.com/quick-menu/) or FX Console (https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2018/05/fx-console-updated-to-v1-0-3/) for super-fast access to all your effects.

[Walter Soyka]

If/else is for branching the flow of execution, not for evaluation. In other words, you use if/else to decide what statements to execute, not what value to return.

Here’s how to do it with if/else:

if (temp > 60) { 
    rates = 500;
} else {
    rates = 150;
}

There’s also an operator called the “conditional operator” or “ternary operator” that works more the way you where thinking — if an expression evaluates true, it returns the first specified value, and if not, it returns the second. It’s written using a question mark and a colon, and here’s how it would work in this case:

rates = (temp > 60) ? 500 : 150;

If/else can do a lot more than this single evaluation, but it’s as compact. The conditional operator is much more limited, but quite compact.

[Walter Soyka]

No, unfortunately, there is not. Wave Warp works on pixels, and Lottie needs paths. I don’t even think Wiggle Paths is well-supported in Lottie.

[Walter Soyka]

We use Flow to work with cubic-bezier values for easing keyframes:

https://aescripts.com/flow/

[Walter Soyka]

If you’re working in a 2D workflow (non-VR like you mentioned), I can see two approaches that would work:

1) Add a 7th virtual display to help you work over the seam. Duplicate, offset, and parent elements that span the real seam so they appear on both the 1st and 7th displays, and this will ensure they render correctly into the seam.

2) Work in two main compositing layers. Build out your 6-display strip and do all your cloud work there, disregarding the seam. Then, precomp it all, apply the Offset effect and shift the seam into the center of the comp, and work in new clouds over the seam to hide them. Just be sure to keep this second layer of work away from the edges of the comp, otherwise you’ll create a new seam in a different place!