We used to use ManicTime: https://www.manictime.com/   It records all activites, including which files and programs where open.   *Martin ... View more

Hello again! Isn't it still in the middle of the night?   OK, let's see. If plugins are not an option, you have to go the hard way.   I don't think that there is a problem with 1000 pictures itself, it's just an enormous task to prepare everything. If you don't mind this, you are good to go.   As descriped above, I would break down everything to a single comp which contains the image and a mask only. Creating the mask from a shape layer is a bit more handy, but you can have the mask directly applied on the image as well. Then you would have to duplicate this comp and switch the image by selecting the layer in the comp, hold ALT key and dragging the new image over the selected. This replaces only the footage, everything else will stay. So you can have already an animation applied and it will still be there. You'll have to repeat this for all your images and it's a matter of your perseverance if you can do it a 1000 times. Alternativly you can write a script, or maybe find one, which does exactly this. If you have no experience in AE scripting and programming, you are faster doing it by hand.   Next step would be to add the animation, but this kind of depends on the animation itself. Say you want to rotate every circle-image in 3D space, so they make a flip, best practice is to apply this animation to the precomp. You would put the precomp including image and mask into a new comp of the same dimensions, switch on 3D and make the animtion.   The next step is to put every precomp including the animation into your "main" comp, forming the final mosaic. This is where AE won't be happy in dealing with 1000 layers. It will work, but you might run into a effect that you cannot see the layers in the UI anymore (some years ago I created a massive triangle-soup with 800 layers or so and ran into this). To prevent this you can split the final mosaic into 4 250 layer comp and finally place the 4 comps into your main comp.    When creating the mosaic, you can use expression to place every individual precomp. For horizontal placement, the next layers x-position is the width of the previous layer (or a constant value, since every precomps have the same dimensions). When you have one horizontal line, you can precomp this. You do this for all lines and then you just need to vertical place all horizontal lines. You can use the same expression logic, but now the layers y-position is the height of the previous layer, or constant value. There are more sophisticated methods using modulo but if you can create horizontal procomps, there is no need to go crazy here.   If not already in use, you should get the script MoveAnchorPoint (there should be a free version still available) for this project. Also TrueLayerDuplicator will come in handy: https://www.vdodna.com/blog/true-layer-duplicator-script-for-after-effects/ And check you TrueCompDuplicator, might be useful as well.   *Martin ... View more

Okay, I understand. Then CC Balls won't help you. I think its less pain to find a script or plugin for this. Even if it cost a bit of money.   Otherwise I can only think of creating a cicle as mask for one image, precomp this, duplicate the precomp and change the image - which is already insane if you have 1000 images. Next step is to animate the precomp and finally arrange all precomps with the animation in your maincomp to create the mosaic. You can use Expressions for this, but still this is an composition with 1000 layers and AE won't like this at all. Splitting it up will help.    *Martin       ... View more

Only simple monocolored dots?   We don't know what you are heading for, but check out CC Balls effect and I'm pretty sure there is a simple mosaic effect or free script available for such a task. Doing this with individual layers is a killer for AE, even on high end machines.   *Martin ... View more

It seems you would like to build an array. In JavaScript you do such a thing with push():   arr = ["Foo", "Bar"] arr.push("Hello World") >> arr >> ["Foo", "Bar", "Hello World"]   Try:     val = value[i]*100 / ps[i];     s.push(val);   *Martin ... View more

You can just cut the hair layer when the seagull it about doing its thing - and parent the cutted layer to the seagulls beak.   It's a bit annoying when you want to adjust the worm later on, but still faster than writing a complex expression which will handle this automatically.   *Martin ... View more

The best approch will be to cut the layers (CTRL+D) and remove the join for the cutted ones.   Of course you can do this dynamically with an expressions, but you'll spend way more time getting the maths done, than just cutting the layers.   *Martin ... View more

If the RGB values are all 0, that is the most dark you can get. Beyond this it's a matter of codec and physical display settings.   *Martin ... View more

Yeah, sorry. Math.max() it has to be - thanks Mylenium!   *Martin ... View more

If think you have to fake it. Point 1 is anchor-point of the box. You need trigonometry to let the box point to point 2 (classic look-at) and point 2 movements must be limited by the length of the box.   *Martin ... View more

AE is very memory hungry. A larger memory can improve speeds, since the computer don't have to swap data from memory to hard drive that often (and this swap took a while and block cpu from working, since it's waiting for data).   If you are working a lot with AE, you better upgrade to 32, or even 64GB of RAM.   "The only program on my computer that is working like it was 20 year ago is AE" - yeah, sadly we have to consider this as normal. Adobe is currently working on multi-frame rendering (already available in beta), so maybe there is hope...   *Martin ... View more

You can organize all your scenes in comps (one comp for each scene, subscene, or whatever logical unit you like) and put all those comps into a main-comp. The main-comp is the one, you render.   I usual end up with 4 or 5 hierarchy levels nesting one comp into another. AE don't mind this, acutally it's easier for AE to process just a few layers, instead of having a large layer stack and long comps, which is you current situation.   You can navigate fast through all the hierachy levels using TAB and the popping up mini-flowchart.   *Martin ... View more

Don't mind those "scores" if you don't know the test system and test circumstances. And don't fix yourself on GPU, since AE does most of its calculation on CPU.   For real world benchmarks and recommendation, have a look at PugetSystems: https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?filter[]=After%20Effects   *Martin   whoops! Wasn't meant as an answer to Mylenium, but OP - sorry! ... View more

That's what I found by googling the error message:   "For the other issue, the error seems to come from the expression itself: fromCompToSurface() is one of the expressions that can retrieve a "bad" value to AE, then it's disabled. For example, if you turn a layer in 3D so that you only see the edge, you'll get this error. To avoid it, you can try replacing fromCompToSurface() by fromComp(), but it depends on your project..." https://aescripts.com/forums/discussion/430/bao-mask-avenger/p2   Maybe this helps.   *Martin ... View more

You can just look at the position property and add the difference manually. You can also write an expression for that - but if you only need this once in a while, it is just a matter of manual alignment.   *Martin ... View more

The sequences in the video are short enough to avoid a loop (at least for the clouds).   To make this seamless, you need to blend. If the blend it smooth enough, the loop will appear to be seamless. Only if you look VERY closely, you'll see the blending.   The best practice is to create the animation with keyframe from start to finish. Next step is to cut the layer in halfway. You can do this with the shortcut CRTL+SHIFT+D. Next you move the behind half to the start of your composition and the first half behind it (actually switching first half and second half). If you play your composition in loop now, the end and the start will be seamless, but there is visible cut in the middle.  The last step is to add a blending on this cut in the middle, large enough to hide it as good as possible.   Now you can add this composition in another, longer composition and apply loop-expression on time warp.   *Martin ... View more

You can export your animation using Bodymovin as HTML5 animation. But I don't see a way to create a HTML document from your videofile or AE project.   *Martin ... View more

If you are doing this regularly, it would be time saving to put all footage in one place once. When reconneting, you just have to reconnect one file and AE will find all the others, since they are in the same path.   If you are creating this path on both systems, nobody needs to relink anything when sharing the project file.   *Martin ... View more

You did great!   However, I don't understand the fps-issue. If you create a new comp with a different fps, and you put your old comp into it, AE just skips or repeats frames. The length of the comp and timing are consitent.   If it works - okay. But this isn't the normal workflow. Maybe you can spend some time investigating this.   *Martin ... View more

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I think you can only edit the post and remove everything.    *Martin ... View more