[Walter Soyka]

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?

[Walter Soyka]

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 time indicator to the first frame of your comp, select all layers, and then hit the left square bracket key.

[Walter Soyka]

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.

[Walter Soyka]

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

[Walter Soyka]

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

dataclay.com

Templater - Automation Plugin For After Effects By Dataclay

Templater is an Adobe® After Effects® plugin that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating customized videos. It empowers you to quickly and easily

[Walter Soyka]

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;
}

[Walter Soyka]

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…)

[Walter Soyka]

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

[Walter Soyka]

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 the blink feature so the cursor stays steady while you’re typing and only blinks when you’re not.

I’m here to teach, so please ask any questions you may have and I’ll do my best to answer.

// get the parent text and style to follow
var parentText = comp("MASTERCOMP").layer("MASTERTEXT")(2)(1);
var parentStyle = comp("MASTERCOMP").layer("MASTERTEXT")(2)(1).style;
var textLength = parentText.length;
var cursorCharacter = ["|","_","—","<",">","«","»","^"];
// get animation progress and cursor selector values from their respective Effects
var animationProgress = effect("Animation")(1);
var cursorCharacterIndex = effect("Cursor Shape")(1).value-1;
// create a blinking cursor. It should be steady as long we're typing, then blink when we're not
var textBlinkDuration = 1;		// how long does a full text blink take?
var textBlinkOffTime = 0.5;	// how much of a text blink is OFF (versus ON)
var currentlyTyping = animationProgress.speed > 0 ? 1 : 0; 
var cursorOnOrOff = currentlyTyping == 1
	? 1 
	: time % textBlinkDuration > textBlinkOffTime; 
// cut the text down according to the Animation slider from 0 to 100%
var revealText = parentText.slice(0, textLength*linear(animationProgress,0,100,0,1));
// add the cursor to the revealed text if it should be on right now
if(cursorOnOrOff != 0){
	revealText += cursorCharacter[cursorCharacterIndex];
}
// reveal the processed text
parentStyle.setText( revealText )

[Walter Soyka]

How are you scaling up each comp? I would make the comp 4k, then add a null and parent all layers to it, then 200% it, unparent and delete null. But that depends on any other parenting you have going on.

There’s a script bundled with Ae (Scale Composition.jsx) that does exactly this. It respects parenting chains correctly and automatically.

A downside of this method, whether you do it manually or with the script, is that some things expressed in pixel values will NOT automatically scale. For example, if you were applying a blur to a shape layer, you’ll have go manually update the Radius value to get the same visual result at the higher resolution.