Hi Martin!
I might be wrong since I haven’t tested your setup directly, but I think the core issue is that linears[] isn’t a function. When you do:

linears[i] = linear(time, t0, t1, 100, 0);

linear() is evaluated immediately, so each linears[i] just stores a number for the current frame. There’s nothing to “call” later.

Your range checks also look…

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I know this thread is pretty old, but I ran into the same problem recently. Dan’s jsxbin approach still works, but the performance hit can be pretty rough on heavier expressions.

I needed something simpler for client deliveries, so I ended up building a small tool called Hugly. It doesn’t hide expressions completely, but it uglifies them enough tha…

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Man, this thread is old! I landed here a while back with the same problem and no real solution, so I ended up building one.

It’s a script called Hextractor. You can paste any text with hex codes, or extract colors directly from shape layers, text, solids, and color controls. It builds a clean palette, and you can save it or generate color guides i…

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yes change the 3 to a 5. Basically this is the time when the animation is over. 😉

so this:

var s = sourceRectAtTime(5, false);
[s.left + s.width/2, s.top + s.height/2];

You could even write 6 if you want to be safe!

Ah I see, the position is being animated through the Text Animator so the sourceRectAtTime is always recalculating. In this case you could replace the “time” in sourceRectAtTime(time, false) by the time when your text is done animating. So if at the 3 second mark, the the animation is done, you could write sourceRectAtTime(3, false).

that would…

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You’re right about protected regions getting in the way here. They lock the timing, so anything driven by a slider or time offset won’t behave the way you want once the clip is stretched.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been dealing with the same issue in my own MOGRTs, and I ended up creating a small script that builds the timing controls and express…

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Hi Helen! I think it would work better with sourceRectAtTime Try it on the anchor point and let me know if it worked. This is usually what I use.

var s = sourceRectAtTime(time, false);

[s.left + s.width/2, s.top + s.height/2];

Cheers.

Y.

Hi Helen! So basically you’d like to control the speed of the start or end range for the animator?

You could add a slider and use this expression on the start property:

var s = effect(“Slider Control”)(1).value;

linear(time, 0, s, 0, 100)

It uses the slider to determine at which second the animation is complete.

I also did a script for these kinds of…

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And I understand your confusion! Actually, this is for a MOGRT. I’ll have different shape configurations and they will transform according to the path selection (keyframe).

using points(), inTangents(), and outTangents() is so clever!

That’s exactly what I needed!

Thank you Dan, again and again. 😅

So here’s my set up:

I have 4 keyframes on a path. my goal is to interpolate from keyframe 1 to 4 (I don’t care about keyframe 2 and 3) but instead of animating all the vertices at once, it animates them by using keyframe 2 and 3’s values.

Is there a way to really going from keyframe 1’s value to keyframe 4’s value and ignore the other keyframes?

Hey all,

I went down this same rabbit hole trying to make Penner easings work reliably in After Effects, especially when switching between 1D, 2D, and 3D properties or building templates for clients.

After getting tired of breaking expressions and rewriting the math every time I wanted to change an easing type, I ended up spending two years learning…

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Hey everyone,

This thread brings back memories. I ran into the same issues trying to apply Penner easings to different property types, especially in expression-driven setups. Doing it manually was always a bit fragile, especially across 1D vs 2D.

I ended up building a tool called Keyless that automates this. It applies Penner easings without…

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Hey all,

I came across this thread while digging into Penner easing issues in AE a while back, and it brought me back. I hit a lot of the same walls, especially trying to get easing like easeInOutExpo or easeOutQuint to behave cleanly with time offsets and user controls in MOGRTs.

I was so fed up that I built a tool to solve it. It lets you apply…

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Hey Amir,

I know this post is a few years old, but I stumbled on it while digging into Penner easings in AE a while back. Totally feel your pain and I hit the same wall when trying to integrate those curves cleanly into expressions, especially for MOGRTs where linear() and ease() just weren’t giving enough control.

That frustration actually led me t…

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Hey Roland,

I checked out the link you shared, and you’re absolutely right that After Effects’ expression engine supports modern features like let and const. Unfortunately, template literals (${} syntax) aren’t part of the supported features, at least not yet.

If you’ve found a workaround or a unique method where template literals actually work,…

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Hey Roland!
I don’t think After Effects expressions support modern JavaScript template literals. because they use an older version of JavaScript (specifically JavaScript 1.2).
Instead, you can achieve the same result using standard string concatenation methods. Here’s how you would rewrite your expression in After Effects:

var baseText =…

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Geez Dan! I took the complicated route ! hahaha yeah that works perfectly.

Is this using the new Per Character expression in 2025?

Hey Gerald, don’t know if it can help but this is pretty useful and I think it might help you out!

Guttentag Vlad!

I managed to do it via multiple text fill color (RGB) animators (one for each color).

Then I added an expression selector that goes like this to aim at each character:

(textIndex % 5 == 0) ? 100 : 0; //5 is the amount of color choices and 0 is the char index

The zero here is the one I’m changing on each animators.
Then I’m having the…

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Hey Roland !

haha yeah it’s always like that!

No haven’t tried the other functions. I’m curious though, as soon as I have a bit of time on my hands, I’ll experiment with them !

Hey Joshua!

If you’re looking for an easier solution, here’s what I usually do (see the screenshot as well):

I create invisible text layers that are included in the Essential Graphics panel for editors to modify. These text layers are then assembled and linked to the main visible text layers. Here’s what the expression looks like:

var year =…

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I just tried setLeftMargin(value) and made it work by linking a slider to it. The margin suddenly was animated when adjusting the slider’s value. Here’s the code I used:

marginValue = effect("Slider Control")(1).value;
text.sourceText.style.setLeftMargin(marginValue);

That’s very cool Roland!

As for these specific expressions, here’s what I found (I think some of them seem pretty useful)

setSpaceBefore(value) – Sets the space before a paragraph.

setSpaceAfter(value) – Sets the space after a paragraph.

setLeftMargin(value) – Adjusts the left margin of a text box.

setRightMargin(value) – Adjusts the right margin…

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Hey Roland !

Haven’t tried all of them but here’s a great video to watch to grasp what some of the new features offers and how to use them !

Hi Tepi!

Something like that should work:

t = Math.abs(Math.round(effect("Number")("Slider"))); // Get the number value
c = Math.abs(Math.round(effect("Comma Position")("Slider"))); // Get the comma position
tStr = t.toString(); // Convert to string
len = tStr.length;
if (c >= len) {
    result = tStr; // If c is larger than number length, return the…

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if you’re interested, you can always learn more on Dan’s website here:

https://www.motionscript.com/articles/speed-control.html

Hi Casey! The issue you’re facing is that when the slider is keyframed, the position calculation is always relative to the current time, which causes an abrupt jump instead of smoothly slowing down. Try this:

spd = thisLayer.effect("Speed")("Slider");
t0 = thisLayer.inPoint;
accum = 0;
n = spd.numKeys;
if (n > 0 && spd.key(1).time < time) {
    accum =…

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Hi Moritz!

What you’re looking for is the linear() method.

Basically you apply this to your rotation and tell it where to take its value from and how to apply it.

Example if 0 on your slider represents 0° of rotation and 100 represents 360°, you would use something like this:

linear(link slider here, 0, 100, 0, 360)

With that method you can remap man…

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Here Tamara, I had a bit of time so I made a simple set up with the “create nulls from path”. Lemme know if it works for you and if you understand or have any questions.

Hi Tamara! Thanks for the screenshot!

Question: Have you tried the “Create Nulls from Path” option in After Effects? It automatically generates a null object for each point on your Bézier path, which can be very helpful! From there, you can dynamically link the nulls to react to the text layers.

If you think you’ll do this kind of action a lot of…

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Hi Tamara! Do you have a screenshot of the bezier path you could share with us?

Sorry Dan! I had the text in a text box so it wasn’t working! haha Also you made me realise I don’t need all that complex expression. Yours has more style hehe

Hey Dan, I think you need to create a style first because setJustification(“alignRight”) creates a new TextDocument object but doesn’t apply the change directly to the style object before calling setText(txt). I think that to make sure the updated justification is applied, the style first has to be updated, then combined with the text content.

Hey Matt! Are you looking for something like this?

// Retrieve the text source from another layer
var textContent = text.sourceText;
// Get the current style of the layer
var currentStyle = textContent.style;
// Update the style with the desired justification
var updatedStyle = currentStyle.setJustification("alignRight");
// Combine the updated style…

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Pleasure was mine Dean. Happy New Year also!

Hi Javad!

I think something like this should work:

const s = effect("Slider Control")(1).value;
[value[0], value[1]+time*s]

Let me know if anything !

Hey Dean, I think this might help you:

For both text layers add this expression for anchor point:

var rect = thisLayer.sourceRectAtTime();
[rect.left + rect.width / 2, rect.top + rect.height / 2];

For the top layer add this expression to its position:

var bottomText = thisComp.layer("Bottom Text"); // Replace with the actual name of the bottom text…

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Hi Doma! This is the kind of thing that would be easy to do using the script Pins & Boxes (link here: https://aescripts.com/pins-and-boxes/ )

If you don’t want to buy a script, then a solution that could work would be to add this expression in the source text:

inputText = "Your full text here"; 
speed = 10; // Characters per second
visibleChars =…

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Hey Adam! Basically what it does now is that you can feed the expression the length of the text (how many characters are in the text) so that the expression know how many characters should have the specific style (font in this case) that you want.

My favorite way of doing this is to have 2 text layers (i.e. day and time) that drives a main layer…

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Hey Taylor! Don’t know if this is gonna help, but I did this in the past and worked well for me. I’ sending over an Ae file where I made different key poses for a mouth and I linked it to a dropdown menu where you can choose which pose you want and keyframe it. I’m simply having the path value changing depending on that menu with this expression…

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if you ever consider upgrading, here’s an expression that works for having 2 different fonts. I also added an option for controlling the font size of the cursor:

var X = text.sourceText;
var F = Math.round(time * effect("Blink Speed")("Slider") % 1); 
var L = X.length;
var T = time * effect("Speed")("Slider") - effect("Start At")("Slider") *…

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Hi Lukasz! So you would like to have a different font for the cursor without upgrading to the new After Effects 2025 which supports the per character expression styling?

Yes, as you can see, the word “effect” is not changed. By holding “Alt” while dragging, or simply using the effect’s index, you make it universal. When I do this, the Expression Universalizer script doesn’t change it. I guess it recognizes that it’s already compatible.

So in the Spanish version, it looks like this:

// Native l…

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Hey Luke, another thing you could check is make sure the frame rate of the composition matches the frame rate of the footage. Sometimes mismatch can lead to details like that.

Alright I got something like that to work. I’m animating the slider with hold keyframes but feel free to try something else. I’m joining a screencast of how it’s behaving and my ae file also.

// Time Offset from Slider
var offset = effect("Slider Control")("Slider")/10; //dividing it by 10 becasue it's sensitive
// Total duration of the loop (from…

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Hi Griffin! Is the property only one value or an array of 2 or more?

What I do is hold ‘Alt’ while pickwhipping a property, which makes it universal by addressing the index. However, at the end of a project, when I need to make it available in any language, I use the script Expression Universalizer.

If you set up a paragraph text box in After Effects, you can use an expression on sourceText to pull in text from your CSV and it’ll split the lines automatically to fit within the box. Something like this:

txt = footage("yourCSVfile.csv").dataValue([0, 0]); // Change this to point to your CSV file and correct cell
txt;

Hi Matthew! Are you talking about a paragraph text box?

In after effects if you simply drag a square with the text tool you can make a paragraph text box.

Let me know if this is what you are referring to.

Cheers.