Time stretch resetting in AE
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Hi,
I am trying to automatically cut out several 2 sec segments from a video that can be between 1.5 and 4 minutes long. As I want the segments to be taken from equally spaced parts of the original video, I am trying to figure out a way to move around the shift and trim points in the templater effect properties depending on the original clip length. One of the ways included using the base video with applied AE Time Stretch property as a guide for trimming.
The problem is… anytime I refresh the data merge, the AE Time Stretch property resets back to 100%?? -
Thanks for your question. Unfortunately, in order for Templater’s Time Sculpting to run, it’s currently necessary for the plugin to reset the Time Stretch property for any layer with the Templater Effect applied back to the default whenever the data is refreshed. This would definitely account for what we’re seeing here.
Now that we know why this is happening, let me see if I can make a few suggestions on methods that we might use to get around this limitation.
First, we could always turn off Templater Time Sculpting features by unchecking the “Time Sculpting” box under the “Use Templater’s” section in the Preferences window. This should deactivate all of Templater Time Sculpting calculations, which should keep the Time Stretch property from being reset whenever Templater is refreshed. The downside to this option is that the Time Sculpting features would be completely unusable moving forward.
Alternatively, we could see if it might be possible to use Templater’s Stretch function to perform the adjustment instead of the “Time Stretch” option in After Effects. This option would depend a bit on how the project is set up, but if we can use Templater to perform the time adjustment, that should alleviate the conflict between AE and Templater both trying to manipulate time settings.
Finally, we might consider using Templater Bot’s Event Script feature to run an ExtendScript to change the Time Stretch option after Templater has run. It should be possible to implement a script that uses the
layer.stretch
command to manually update that setting on the “After layers update” event in order to set that value after Templater has run its reversioning tasks.However, it should be noted that this might produce some additional issues if we need the layer that’s been updated to be Time Sculpted since the script would be running after Templater has finished applying its logic to the project.
Hopefully, these suggestions should help to get things moving in the right direction, but if you have any questions, please let us know and we’ll do whatever we can to help out.
Thanks,
Jeff
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@Jeff
Thanks for getting back to me. I will investigate Event script. If only overlap in Templater time shift feathre could be adjusted with an expression in AE that would probably solve it…
Will figure something outthanks once again
best
v.
