The global object in After Effects
It’s all about the $. One of the undocumented expression language feature in After Effects is the global object, also known as $. And it turns out that $ can bring you happiness…
After Effects
Debugging extendscript files with VSCode
Extendscript Toolkit is Adobe’s development environment for anyone working with the inbuilt scripting language for their Creative Suite aps. And, well, it’s been needing some love for a long time now.
It’s a shibboleth for After Effects nerds!
Ok After-Effects people, here’s a t-shirt that will be instantly recognisable to any animator / motionographer / compositor / editor / post-production colleagues, but completely meaningless to the muggles. Let your keyframe-tweaking flag fly! Comes in any colour, as long as it’s grey, because of course it’s grey, silk screened from a vector file, not … Continue reading It’s a shibboleth for After Effects nerds!
Proxynator – a script to link multiple files to proxies in After Effects – now with a UI!
I’ve been working with 6K footage from our Kinefinity Terra camera. To stop things grinding to a halt I’ve written a script for After Effects to allow me to set a whole folder’s worth of proxies at once.
Auto orienting the drop shadow on an auto-oriented layer
I have some background elements that I want to wander around, and because I’m lazy I don’t want to hand animate them, so they just have a wiggle expression applied to their position channel and auto-orient switched on. Instant crowd scene! But I want them to have a drop shadow. Normally to keep the drop … Continue reading Auto orienting the drop shadow on an auto-oriented layer
AE finally managed to fully utilise my CPU
…and this is what it took. Since Adobe removed multi-processing from After Effects I’ve been using the shell to run multiple instances of the aerender application. This can lead to massive performance gains – the screenshot below shows a 4,000% improvement in speed.
This-n-that – a selection tool
I’m doing a couple of month’s intensive After Effects work at the moment and I’m making tools to help the process. It’s a bit like making jigs for woodwork – a little time spent on a jig makes the whole process much easier later on. So here’s a little jig that helps with the sometimes…
Symmetry Expressions for Anchor Points and Positions
From the “Posted on the Blog so I Can Remember it Next Time” department: A useful expression for making things symmetrical.
The Cloninator – clones layers and creates a new source
This is a script I should have written years ago. It’s fairly simple; it duplicates the selected layer in a comp, but unlike the built-in duplicate function it creates a new source for the layer in the project, allowing the copy and the original to be independent of each other.
Using data from an external file to drive expressions in AE
If you want your AE project to access data from an external file to drive expressions you can use the javascript evalFile() function in an expression.