| ||||||||||
|
Adobe has already had a long track record of either buying up 3rd party to fold in (CC, Keylight, etc...) or not bothering to work on lesser priority areas if existing solutions are already out there. This shouldn’t be a surprise to a veteran user like yourself at this point.
A frame counter is so trivial and is made so easily in a number of ways. Don’t want to spend money on more advanced 3rd party solutions, that’s totally fine. That very reason is why I chose to proactively grow my knowledge as an individual ages ago, versus waiting behind and hoping a corporation would come around to fix all my trivial problems. You've already figured out one way with the precomp solution. Ideal, no. Does it get the job done, yes. My suggestion with expression works just fine too and actually allows more flexibility for you since you can use a mono spaced font (or not, the option exists), scale the font size to as large as you like. It also allows you to change the starting number value, and set as many zeros you like. Do the work once and make a preset, then it becomes one click.
In it's most basic form After Effects already has the expression setup as an Animation Preset. Just open the Effects panel and search for “Frame Number” in the Animation Presets. Drag that into your comp and you get a super basic frame counter.
A more advanced setup to address your padding concerns would be like this. You can copy and paste this into the "Source Text" property expression of a TextLayer.
// COPY EVERYTHING BELOW HERE...
var numberLength = 5;
var startingNumber = 0; var frame = timeToFrames()+startingNumber; var dif = (numberLength-frame.toString().length); var pad = ""; var result = frame;; if(dif < numberLength){ for(var i=0; i<dif; i++){ pad += "0"; } result = pad+frame; } result;
//...AND ABOVE HERE.
Don't like to type numbers manually into the expression? Totally fine, that's why AE has Expression controls. Just add two Expression Sliders to the TextLayer and just pickwhip one slider to the numberLength variable and the other slider to the startingNumber variable.
var numberLength = PICKWHIP SLIDER 1 TO HERE;
var startingNumber = PICKWHIP SLIDER 2 TO HERE;
Still wanna holdout on Adobe fixing something this trivial? You may want to keep in mind that AE users have been suggesting the timeToFrames expression solution since at least 2005, if not earlier.
but who knows maybe it requires a 15 year work process to figure out. ;-)
On December 11, 2019 at 4:19 PM Lloyd Alvarez <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote: -- "The most useless day is that in which we do not laugh" |
