Use markers in After Effects as triggers for a particular animation

Question

I have a one precomp animations (from stocks). And I am searching for a script /expression that will automate a certain animation for my project. I have a long videos with premade subtitles srt file and I want to use subtitles timestamps (not a subtitle text content!) convert them to markers an link that one animation precomp to each and every starting marker on a specific AE layer. Finally I wanto to trigger an animation precomp by starting markers of on a layer.

Suppose I have 3 hour video with 30 captions in a one .srt file. I import a video then I import .srt file via pt_importsubtitles (it will convert stamps to markers) and I will have a video already in sync with 30 imported markers on a АЕ layer from a one .srt file.

Importantly, I do not interested of any imported text captions (although it will be good if text will be imported to marker's comment field) but only thing I am interested is (markers) timstamps of a srt file.

I want to buy a script that will link a precomp to bunch of (timestamps) markers.

Only thing i found is this video

Any help for a complete dummy in AE?

Answer 1

Markers are a special time of key, basically you can think of them as keys on a property of the layer called "marker", just like you can use keys on say, the position property. To access a marker on a layer you use

var myMarker = marker.key(n)

where n is the number of the key you want (counting from 1, not zero. WTF Adobe?) or alternatively:

var myMarker = marker.nearestKey(time)

Which will give you the nearest key, which can be ahead of or behind the current time.

Once you have the markerKey object you can get its time, duration, index (useful if you used the nearestKey method), and all of the metadata that can be stored in markers (quite a lot). Details about all the marker properties here. For example, if your marker has a comment, you can get the text of the comment thus

var myMarker = marker.key(n);
var theComment = myMarker.comment;

You can access comp markers too, just use

var myMarker = thisComp.marker.key(n); //or
var myOtherMarker = thisCom.marker.nearestKey(time);

Answer 2

Check out Marker Remap at www.aescripts.com/marker-remap . It takes the principles from the video you reference above and adds a powerful After Effects panel to control marker additions and timing.

Answer 3

In a small touch of self-advertising, I'd like to refer to the free script MarkerTriggery for AE. It brings a neat UI you can control your markers from, and you don't need to know anything about expressions to use it.