Here’s a little movie that demonstrates a text track being used to “trigger” the opacity of another track.
Controlling Pip Opacity From Text
I needed a blinking pip. (It’s actually for an interesting optical effect… but for now, we’ll just talk about the pip.) Rather than keyframing each blink, I used a Text track where A is a very dim blink, and Z is a very bright blink. The blinks all have the same luminous decay. Every keyframe on the Text track triggers a new blink.
The expression to do this is actually a little program. (Exactly what some artists hate…)
Here’s the expression for controlling the Pip’s opacity. It’s in 3 parts: 1) Find the most recent Text track keyframe, 2) See what letter it was, from A to Z, and 3) Set the opacity, taking into account the brightness and how long it’s been decaying.
// find most recent key
var s = thisComp.layer("controlTrack").text.sourceText; // score layer
var n = s.numKeys;
var kValue = "A"; // default value
var kTime = 0;
for(var i = 1; i <= n; i++)
{
var k = s.key(i);
if(k.time <= time)
{
// only care if there's a char in our position.
var a = k.value.charAt(0).toUpperCase();
if(a >= "A" && a <= "Z")
{
kValue = a;
kTime = k.time;
}
}
}
// now, how long ago was that?
var age = time - kTime;
// map character a-z to 0.0-1.0
kValue = kValue.charCodeAt(0);
kValue -= 65;
kValue = kValue / 25.0;
// decay appropriately
var result = kValue * Math.pow(0.3, age) * transform.opacity;
// done.
result
Why do this tricky control business with a text track, instead of just keyframing the flashes more directly? This way, the behavior is very well specified... and even more so for the next movie.
Controlling Five Pips With a Text Track
You can easily see what's going on here. Five characters control five pip's blinks.
The clever bit was to avoid pasting that monster expression from above into five different tracks. Instead, a single slider control track is driven from the text, and shows the first pip's blinking at time=0, the second pip's at time=300, the third's at time=600, and so on. The whole animation is 20 seconds, so there's plenty of room on the timeline for this.
Each pip's opacity is driven from the appropriate section of this slider channel:
pip0 opacity: transform.opacity * thisComp.layer("controlTrack").effect("scoreReader")("Slider").valueAtTime(time + 0*300)
pip1 opacity: transform.opacity * thisComp.layer("controlTrack").effect("scoreReader")("Slider").valueAtTime(time + 1*300)
pip2 opacity: transform.opacity * thisComp.layer("controlTrack").effect("scoreReader")("Slider").valueAtTime(time + 2*300)
... and so on.
So, why pile this cleverness atop an already tricky expression? Because with an expression that tricky, anything is better than duplicating five times across different tracks!
Here's the expression, which extracts brightness from the text track, for each position, at times separated by 300 seconds.
// Allow different sections of this track to extract the brightness for each pip.
// we divide it up into 5 minute segments (300 seconds). To find out your brightness
// at a particular time, examine *this* track at time + 300 * pipNumber.
//
// This is an alternative to duplicating the rather ornate expression into each pip, at
// the expense, of course, of complexity.
//
var segmentDuration = 300;
var segmentIndex = Math.floor(time / segmentDuration);
var segmentTime = time - segmentIndex * segmentDuration + .01; // local time... plus 1/100 for roundoff
// find most recent key
var s = thisComp.layer("controlTrack").text.sourceText; // score layer
var n = s.numKeys;
var kValue = "A"; // default value
var kTime = 0;
for(var i = 1; i <= n; i++)
{
var k = s.key(i);
if(k.time <= segmentTime)
{
// only care if there's a char in our position.
var a = k.value.charAt(segmentIndex).toUpperCase();
if(a >= "A" && a <= "Z")
{
kValue = a;
kTime = k.time;
}
}
}
// now, how long ago was that?
var age = segmentTime - kTime;
// map score character a-z to 0.0-1.0
kValue = kValue.charCodeAt(0);
kValue -= 65;
kValue = kValue / 25.0;
// decay appropriately
var result = kValue * Math.pow(0.3, age);
result
And lastly, here's the self-contained After Effects project.
enjoy