The behavior of Shift on Windows (and most other OSs and typewriters too) makes sense to me. I didn't realize that the semantics were different on a Mac. Shift means to invert the sense of the capitalization. So if your Caps Lock is on, you use Shift to get lower-case letters. Otherwise, you have no...

I'm pretty sure that AE is multithreaded (beyond threading for the UI and caching) and capable of utilizing multiple processors. While it won't render more than one frame at a time, the effects and image processing architecture can be distributed across the processors in a system, where possible. Fo...

I'm stumped. UILayout_13.jsx should be in the subdirectory (lib) of the directory in which PrecompToDuration.jsx is located. The fact that you are getting an error about UILM_DISABLE_STRING_DISPLAY_WIDTH_GUESS means that it is finding and loading UILayout_13.jsx. Why it isn't defined by the time the...

That variable should be defined in UILayout_13.jsx. I'm not getting the error here. Hmm. Try downloading UILayout_13 again on the off chance that it was corrupted during transfer. If you're still having the problem, I'll keep investigating.

Peter

I forgot to mention: the script depends on UILayout_13.jsx which is a version of the layout manager I wrote. See http://www.aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?t=128 to download it. I too use this script frequently. So, while I'm at it, many thanks to Brian, Keiko, and Dan for conceiving and implementing t...

When I started using this script, I added a dialog for my own use. See if this works for you:
http://www.petertorpey.com/files/ae/scr ... ration.jsx

Peter

I wish I were going to SIGGRAPH. It's been two years since I last attended and I miss it.

If there is enough interest, someone could schedule a BOF for AE Enhancers. It's probably too late to do that for this year, though.

Additionally, you may want to try using some of the built-in string scanning (e.g. indexOf() or split()) or regular expression functions rather than looping through the characters in a string. The implementation of the built-in functions are likely more efficient and easier to use.

Peter

Are you trying to modify just one element in the current value array for a property or are you just trying to assign an array as a value? The former requires that you copy the value array to a variable, manipulate it there, and then reassign it to the property using setValue(). If you are reading th...

ECMA-262 actually doesn't specify a const declaration. It only states that const is a future reserved keyword. The AE interpreter does implement const but, unfortunately, it isn't that useful. Typically, constants are defined at a global scope. Doing so in a script poses a problem, though. The globa...

I don't have AE in front of me right now but I do see a number of things that could be problematic. Since you are dealing with file names, not comp names, the truncation block is unecessary and potentially harmful. If your file name is longer than 30 characters, it will lop off the end, file extensi...

I wish there was #define or that ECMAScript had const or final declarations. I typically just define a bunch of regular vars at the beginning of the script with their names in all caps so that I remember not to modify them elsewhere. I had written a little property inspector script which would give ...

I would suggest using match names for effects and their parameters in most cases. Use the property() method of the parent PropertyGroup passing it the match name string to receive a reference to the effect or parameter you want. Using the display name of an effect or parameter (the name as it appear...

I'm not certain that the script will work as you had intended. However, for the line and error in question, it fails because nuName is a string while the item() method expects an integer index into the project's ItemCollection. Since you are using the active item, you already have a reference to the...

If I follow correctly, you could do the calculations in a normalized space and then, at the last minute, apply pixel dimensions for positioning on a layer. The basic expressions can be computed over a normalized range [0.0..1.0] in an expression control (possibly on a null layer). That way, the boun...