Make no mistake. Expressions are slow. No matter what application you are working with, expressions, by nature can easily bog down you application through frame dependancy evaluations, if you are not careful. Unfortunately, After Effects is built around expressions. This is why it is important to consider a bake tool that can allow you to better manage your projects.

Handle a lot of projects with large, slow expressions? Easy Bake takes a lot of the headache out of expression-laden scenes

There are a few bake tools out there, especially for After Effects, showing that it is a problem that eventually needs addressing.

If you are unfamiliar, baking will take expressions and other scene elements and convert or translate them into keyframes. So technically it is possible to take a per-frame evaluating expression, or expressions, and convert them into keyframes. This makes the scene much faster, as the evaluation and computation is taken out of the equation.

The problem then becomes having way too many keyframes to manage from the bake.

This is why a collaboration between Khanyu and Zack Lovatt sparked to build a new bake tool for after effects that offers a simple and fast way to bake out expressions, while still giving you plenty of control.

Easy Bake allows you to bake out entire compositions & layers in After Effects, all with a single click of a button.

As a bake tool, Easy Bake can also optimize the keyframes in the scene. The script will prune away any redundant keys, making sure you only have what you need.

Learn more about Easy Bake, after effects bake tool, over at aescripts + aeplugins.