Often when using expression math to drive animation in After effects, it may be nice to go in and hand tweak certain areas either to clean up or to modify what is going on. We can do this by “baking” the expression into keyframes, however it is typical that baking produces a key for every frame regardless if it is needed or not. Not so with the new Jake & Dan offering Smart Baker for After Effects is a script that will detect straight linear interpolation and motionless gaps when baking which really makes the baking process more effective! Check out the post and download the Smart Baker Tool For After Effects script here.
When using expressions to drive our animations in After Effects, we often need to go back to hand-animation. There are all kinds of ways to switch from expressions back to keyframe animations using parenting, scripts and so forth, but mostly you’ll end up baking the expressions into keyframes. Unfortunately, AE bakes the values every single frame – resulting in a vast quantity of keyframes, even when the layer in question didn’t move. To make the baking process more useful, we wrote a little script called JD Smart Baker, to detect straight linear interpolation and motionless gaps
http://www.creatogether.com/wp-content/themes/jake-dan/samples/jdSmartBaker.jsx
