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backbeatmedia
New Participant
January 21, 2022
Question

JSON SourceData late evaluation problem with aerender (Windows)

  • January 21, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 223 views

Hello - 

 

I have an AE 2022 installation that I'm using to render data driven video clips with aerender. Before each call to aerender I make a new JSON file. The JSON file is in the project, and is a layer in the comp.

 

I have an expression in the text layer  like this:

 

footage("file.json").sourceData.field1

 

I also have a transform expresssion on the text object which resizes it to fit long words into a given width

 

Whe I render from the UI, it's fine. When I render from aerender, the first frame or two of the output does not pick up the JSON text, unless I remove the resize transformation.

 

I have another project which is the same except it uses a Creative Dojo effect to do the resize. That works fine.

 

I don't want to use Creative Dojo on this new job unless I have to. Can anyone suggest a fix?

 

Cheers

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

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backbeatmediaAuthor
New Participant
January 25, 2022

OK I have solved this issue and in case anyone else has this problem, here's what I did:

 

1. The JSON footage file is a layer in the comp, as usual, however I made sure that this layer was lower down the comp than the text layer containing the "sourceData" expression. Presumably that means it gets evaluated first.

 

2. I added a keyframe on the first frame of the JSON layer, and the expression layer

 

I think it was item (1) above that fixed it. FYI this was all running on a Windows EC2 instance, which may or may not have been causing the trouble.

Mylenium
Mylenium
Brainiac
January 22, 2022

Without any idea what your code looks like and how/ where it's used we can't tell you much. Sounds like it's perhaps a bit too oversimplified compared to the commercial version and thus doesn't correctly evaluate.

 

Mylenium

B
backbeatmediaAuthor
New Participant
January 24, 2022

Hello - thanks for replying. What code would you like to see? The expression is only the code I pasted above. I have applied the Creative Dojo effect to this project and it has not fixed the issue. So the text from the JSON file is not picked up by footage().sourceData in time for the render if there is a scale transformation on the text layer.

 

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