After Effects, scripting and nerdery
I’ve been writing new scripts recently, mostly simple UI-less tools that do what they’re called, like show guide layers.jsx and remove disabled effects.jsx. There’s now a decent collection, and I’m adding new ones all the time. So rather than having to download them separately I’ve packaged all the ready-for release ones into a single zip … Continue reading All the scripts
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.
This is a tool for finding and replacing text in expressions, layer names, property names (the ones that can be renamed) and text content. It can use javascript regular expressions to do the job, so you can do complex search and replaces, but regular ol’ find-foo-replace-with-bar will still work. Teaching regular expressions is waaaay beyond … Continue reading Find-n-replace for AE
Depressing lockscreen pics for Windows 10. Windows 10 gives users beautiful pictures of aspirational places for their lockscreen, places much more interesting than where you are—at work, typing in your password so you can get back to that spreadsheet. Well, you can fix that…
Because it’s so useful for adding pleasing randomness to anything, Wiggle has become a kind of gateway drug to expressions. But it has a much less famous sibling, noise. I’ve never really played with noise before, so I thought I’d investigate it further.
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…
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.
…or at least a content-centric anchor point on a shape layer. I don’t like the way After Effects does shape layers. There, I’ve said it. Here’s my attempt to make things better.
A tool for removing unwanted Bézier handles on keyframes. This is a useful tool that’s included in my scripts bundle, but which I haven’t explained on this blog. It converts spatial keyframes from Bézier to linear, but unlike alt-clicking with the pen tool it allows you to choose to convert the in or out handle, … Continue reading Zap Spatial Tangents
As described in this tutorial, aiming lights can be easier if you can see “through” the light using a camera duct-taped on to it. Commonly found in 3D apps, the light-view option is sadly lacking in After Effects. Well here’s a script to do the duct-taping for you.