After Effects, scripting and nerdery
After Effects never crashes or hangs ever, because computers are the best… …and it especially doesn’t crash when you haven’t saved for a really long while—that never happens. So when it does, you have to do the dance where you find the autosaved version, check dates, drag it out and then rename it. SO MUCH … Continue reading Out of the wreckage: Autosave Restore.
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.
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!
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.
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
From the “Posted on the Blog so I Can Remember it Next Time” department: A useful expression for making things symmetrical.
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.
You can use text layers in After Effects as expression editors which means, among other things that a whole lot of layers can use the same expression. This has some big advantages: expressions update as you type, which gives you instant feedback. You can see and edit your expression right in the composition viewer, without … Continue reading Using text layers as expression editors in After Effects
Here’s a gif I whipped up for @animatedloop‘s gif gallery. The theme is “Geometric”. I used After Effects, ImageMagick and gifsicle.
The lookAt() function in After Effects’ expression language doesn’t work for 2D. If you’re trying to use it to align the layer to look at a given point, without having to remember all the trigonometry you learned in school, it turns out you should have spent less time smoking behind the shelter sheds, because this is … Continue reading LookAtMe! A 2D lookAt() function in AE Expressions