Smart Baker

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 - but let the image speak for itself:

Smart Baking

The Detection threshold is a value between 0 and 15 relating to the gap and linear interpolation detection as follows:

rounded keyframevalue = keyframevalue / (10 ^ (10 - threshold))

Usage:

Select the property that has the expression you would like to bake or already has keyframes created by the "Convert Expression To Keyframes" keyframe assistant, set the detection threshold and press the Smart Bake button. Simple as pie!