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Volition74au
Inspiring
May 26, 2023
Open for Voting

Remove Keyframes with scripts. Not one keyframe at a time, because that's too painful!

  • May 26, 2023
  • 0 replies
  • 170 views

Let's start off by acknowledging one of the efficient features in After Effects that allows us to remove keyframes from any property simply by clicking the time-vary stopwatch. It's like an undo button for commitment. 

 

Recently, I've been baking in some expressions for a comp. To speed up my workflow, I've run some expressions that tailor each comp according to a CSV file, essentially creating a dynamic racing scoreboard. However, this process has a minor downside - it's like a really enthusiastic party planner, it puts a keyframe on every single frame. So, I manually hit the time-vary stopwatch to blast away the keyframes - a quick fix but not ideal considering the multitude of layers and properties in play.

My initial thought was to script a solution to obliterate these unwanted keyframes. While it works as intended, it's a bit like watching a snail complete a marathon. It iterates through every single keyframe on my selected properties, which is just painfully slow. I've found that I can manually click the stopwatches faster. Much faster. But, alas, carpal tunnel syndrome is not on my bucket list.

 

So here's the Magic question: Does anyone out there in the After Effects world know of a way to script the equivalent of clicking the time-vary stopwatch to deactivate keyframes? If such a magic trick exists, I'm all ears, and it would completely make my feature request redundant.

 

However, if I'm correct (which usually happens only on every alternate Tuesday), I've got a request. Can we possibly gain access to the time-vary stopwatch feature via expressions? It can't be too hard, right? After all, you've already designed this wonderful function - all we're asking for is a backdoor. I'm begging can we get access to this feature?