Getting here a bit late but it seems like a good opportunity to mention that you can place adjustment layers in a precomp and then nest that precomp (with transformations collapsed) inside additional comps. This gives you centralized access to the effects.

On Aug 31, 2012 7:04 PM, "Teddy Gage" <teddygage@gmail.com> wrote:
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> Ah I went the lazy man's route and just re-cut the layers to start at their original in-point. But that makes a lot of sense as to why the transition didn't occur at the "visual layer in-point." And should be extremely useful in the future. Then, because ft-Instance won't link to expressions I used an animation preset of the instanced effect (still referencing the master effect) and dropped it on all the layers. But then I still couldn't change the transition length for all of them at once, because that info was just a number embedded in the transition expression. so I made a slider control, linked that to transition length, and now all the effect-preset-instanced expressions could be changed from that one variable slider. I DARE the client to ask me to change the page peel length again!
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> sorry for the email flood guys. too much coffee this morning. 
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> On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Chris Zwar <chris@chriszwar.com> wrote:
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>> On 31/08/2012, at 4:11 AM, Teddy Gage wrote:
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>>> The second issue I'm now having is that even though "this.inPoint" is supposed to start at the layer's inpoint, I still have to scrub the layer back in time to find out where it is actually starting the transition. Is there another pointer besides this.inPoint? I tried thisLayer.inPoint and it was still starting the transition back at the zero mark, even if the layer didn't start being visible until 30 seconds in. This could be because I split the layers (they are stills) and it's looking at the origin in point and not the actual in point in the composition. does that make any sense?
>>
>>
>> Hi,
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>> Just to give you something different to think about, I usually build these sort of automated expressions to work in numbers of frames.  I tend to think of 25 - 50 frame transitions rather than 1 or 2 second transitions.  This code sets up a few basic variables that I use:
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>> // in seconds //
>> start=thisLayer.inPoint;
>> end=thisLayer.outPoint;
>> dur=end-start;
>> count=time-start;
>>
>> //in frames //
>> fps = 1 / thisComp.frameDuration;
>> start=start*fps;
>> end=end*fps;
>> dur=dur*fps;
>> count=count*fps;
>> count=clamp(count,0,dur); // optional //
>>
>> [count]
>>
>> If you want a variable that counts the number of frames into the layer it is, you need to subtract the layer's in-point from the composition time.  This might be the hint you're after.
>>
>>
>> -Chris
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