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Volition74au
Inspiring
June 4, 2023
Open for Voting

Expression That forces AE to evaluate an expression Once in a Comp.

  • June 4, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 474 views

I have a number of comps that uses a csv to show a leaderboard for RC car racing. I import the data into a csv from data from our scoring software. And that works great. But come time to do any kind of animation it just isn't practical. 

Solutions I have and can try. Turning off the exprerssions. Do the animations and turn them on when the render is being done and variations of shying and hiding. Another solution is Easy Bake plugin or similar. Use posterize(0) at top of expression.

Now all methods help at times and at the same time are just tiresome.
Why doesn't Adobe create a AE function that forces AE to evaluate that expression only once in the comp.
Or it could even have a time input where you could trigger it.

OK so imagine a function called
forceEvaluate(time = inPoint)
so we use this function when we want AE to only evaluate the expression that follows/or proceeds it at the inputed time value. To me it seems possible. I mean AE holds the data for a value of a property it just does the calc and then stores it unless. Either this or some other clever option.
I mean my csv values do the same calculation every single frame accross 8 columns and up to 50 rows. Just killing my Comp. and I cannot see a clever way.

Easy Bake works, but then it creates a keyframe for every single frame also killing the comp. I end up hitting the stopwatch to clear them but i may have to do that a bunch of times. It's just all really inefficient.

What do people think. Gotr any suggestions to solve my issue. Would it be useful a function like that. would it be possible Adobe or some programming guru?

Very frustrating to get out footage of our races with scoreboards as I may have up to 100 races in a meet nad this is just not practical.

 

I may have to go down the scripting route to fill in the data. OI've just done a whole ton of work with my expressions and templates and it would basically be starting again.







Iwas thi

2 replies

Volition74au
Inspiring
June 5, 2023

Do you know if 

posterizeTime() defaults to 0 as the input variable. I've tried both and it doesn't really help. I noted that expression in my post. My comp just gets bogged down making animating non CSV data not practical. I suspect it helps when rendering but not previewing maybe.

 

I'll have another play, but I may have to go down a script that prefills the comp. If not. Which is frustrating as I would have wasted hours. Well I'll know the best approach for the future though.

Mylenium
Legend
June 4, 2023

You can use posterizeTime(0) to suppres evaluation. Read the online help.

 

Mylenium