[William Walker]

Hello.
Many thanks for your reply – desolated I didn’t get to answer sooner.
I will try your solution today and see how that fits.

We(part of a team working on an animation ☺ ) managed however to improvise an expression to suit our purpose at the time (before I got your reply) – 1st we parented our layers one to another as to create our desired shut-down order. After that we set up a slider control on a null holding values between 0 and 1 to allow us to adjust the delay between the shutdowns. Finally, we came up with this in our opacity:
parent.transform.opacity.valueAtTime(time-thisComp.layer(“CONTROLLER”).effect(“DELAY”)(“Slider”));
where CONTROLLER is the null and DELAY is the slider on it.
We used “Screen A” as the master and adjusted the opacity on it. All the parented layers had the above expression applied onto them.

Again, many thanks and sorry for not getting back with them earlier :).
I’m very curious as to how your expression will work so I’ll definitely give it a try today.

Cheers and all the best.

[William Walker]

Hi

The sequence is initiated by the central screen – screen A, set in the middle of the comp and it should occur at precisely 3 seconds after the beginning of the composition. There’s no other special trigger for this action.

I have stacked the layers according to their switch-off order in hope of making use of the index value – thus Screen A, which initiates the sequence is 1, Screen B – the first to go off is 2, then C is 3 and so on.

The screens are placed inside the comp in such a way as to encircle Screen A. Bellow is an example of the arrangement – it’s sort of a spiralling effect that I’m after, fading off from middle to the margins.

G H I
F A B
E D C

Please let me know if there’s any more info that’s needed and many thanks for your help
Cheers,