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Inspiring
November 2, 2022
Question

"Undefined" behavior when translating EGT by an expression power Essential Graphic Property

  • November 2, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 211 views

I discovered unexpected behaviour when translating essengraphic template layers by a essential graphic property that was calculated in said template. (In this case the width of the text box).

Affected versions: AE23.0, AE23.1(Beta)

Operating system: Windows

Reproduction:
I made a template for a textbox done with expressions.

This template is controlled by EGP and two EGP output the width and height of the box.

For one use chase I chained them next to each other and wanted to translate the following textboxes by the width of the previous ones.(The precomp layers are all identical). Its set up to be moved with nulls. To move them out of the way, I translated the next batch by the previous width. The width of the textbox is output in an Essential Graphic Property.

 

The expression used to move the null object xPosition

 

let widthHeadline = thisComp.layer("Headline_Render_1").essentialProperty("BOX")("Width");
let widthDescription = thisComp.layer("Description_Render_1").essentialProperty("BOX")("Width") + thisComp.layer("Controller").effect("Description_Offset")(1)[0];
	
widthHeadline < widthDescription ? widthDescription : widthHeadline;

 

Expected Result:

(Moved manually)

Actual Result:

 

The layer content moved outside of the layer boundary even though folding isn't activated.

The orange dot should be 60 pixels right of the anchor point.

 

 

(I run into another missing feature regularly - audio levels can't be controlled by EGP - is this known?)

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

JohnColombo17100380
Community Manager
Community Manager
November 3, 2022

Hi @Agrarvolution,

In order to get the right eyes on your post, I've moved it from Bugs to Discussion and changed the Scripting tag to Expressions ( since this is an expression question ).If it does indeed turn out to be a bug, myself or one of the moderators will be able to move this thread back into the Bugs section for further investigation.

 

I hope some of the expression experts here in the Community can weigh in on what might be going wrong with this setup. To get an answer quickly, I'd recommend providing a project file that demonstrates the issue.

 

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

Inspiring
November 3, 2022

Thanks, I wasn't aware I skipped a step here. It was pretty late when I created this post. I'm sorry for that.

 

Here is a project that causes this issue for me. It's still pretty strange that an expression causes the layer content to break out of the layer. There is no "Transform effect" on it which would normally cause this.