After Effects Script of the Week: Change Render Locations

Change Render Locations is included with the regular After Effects installation - go ahead, look under File > Scripts, there it is - and it solves one tedious After Effects workflow issue, that you can’t reassign multiple items in the Render Queue to a new render location.

Before selecting the script, make sure any render destined for a new location is checked, as that’s how this scripts knows which render location to move. Now simply assign the new location, and you get confirmation of the new output path.

Badabing, badaboom.

After Effects Script of the Week: pt ExpressEdit

Expressions are among the most powerful additions you can make to your After Effects game. They are also fragile; set up 4 dozen staggered dependency layers to create a pattern form and then somehow delete the layer they point to, even for a moment, and all of the expressions are reset. And making a fix that applies to each of those layers can be the very definition of tedious.

There’s the magic word - tedious. If it’s an After Effects fask to which that description fits, it’s an obvious candidate for a script, and pt ExpressEdit is the right tool for anyone who works with expressions a lot, or even a lot of expressions once in a while.

After Effects Script of the Week: MochaImport

My number one tip for anyone who needs to do tracking in After Effects is to break open the installation of mocha for After Effects (or “mocha AE”) that ships with the application (and has since CS4). Nominally a “planar tracker” used for screen replacements and so on, it can actually be used to track just about anything with more intelligence than the point tracker built in to After Effects. The thing that keeps most people from doing this is:

a. they do not know that mocha AE is included with After Effects
b. they don’t know how to use mocha AE
c. they don’t know what to do with the tracking or corner pin data once it’s generated

Let’s consider (a) solved, assuming you read the first paragraph, and resources are available to address (b). That leaves (c).

After Effects Script of the Week: KeyTweak

Note: This is an ongoing series that features one After Effects script a week. For an overview on scripts, check out the debut post.

Just this morning, I found myself stuck. I had a good corner pin track of a handheld cell phone screen that needed to be replaced, but there was a problem; the visible, trackable object was the hand holding the phone rather than the phone itself, and the hand moved and changed its angle as the shot progressed. Fixing this in MochaAE, where the track was created, was difficult, because Mocha was doing its job correctly.

Instead, I used KeyTweak (Shareware, current suggested price $5) to change the frame-by-frame motion track data over time.

After Effects Script of the Week: pt EffectSearch

Note: this article is part of an ongoing series that features one After Effects script a week. For an overview on scripts, check out the debut post.

The problem: You are up against a deadline and working with a project from a freelancer. You open a project that was created on another system and boom! - too many third party plug-in effects are missing for After Effects even to tell you which ones, or where they are located. You face a long, tedious process of looking in every comp for every layer with applied effects, to attempt to locate the missing ones.

Or you can try pt EffectSearch. Not only can it return a list of all plug-ins of a certain type in your project - missing, third-party, built-in, on or off, within all comps, the open comp or a selection you make in the Project panel - it can take action on the result.

After Effects Script of the Week: Immigration

Ask any veteran After Effects artist who uses scripts which ones should really be built right into the application and among the top handful for most artists will be Immigration. It provides an interface to work with image sequences, something that the file system (Finder or Windows Explorer) and Adobe applications which rely on it (all of them) doesn’t do well.

Script of the Week: Shortcut Key Reference

This week’s script of the week does not, by itself, replace any multiple-step tasks in After Effects for you, yet it may have the most power overall to make your workflow more efficient.

In my book and whenever teaching people to work in After Effects I find myself a huge advocate of keyboard shortcuts, of which there are literally hundreds in After Effects. Some of these shortcuts are listed right in the UI menus, while others can only be discovered if you look them up, or if someone teaches them to you. Given enough time, you can learn them in an ad-hoc fashion, but attempting to learn them all at once by, say, reading the manual cover-to-cover just doesn’t work unless you have a strong photographic memory. That shouldn’t be a prerequisite for working efficiently.

Shortcut Key Reference simply takes the list of shortcut keys that is used by the application itself and places it in a panel that can be left open in the After Effects UI. It’s searchable, so if what you’re trying to do has a term that is easy to define, you can look for it, but it’s also easily scannable; you can take a minute or two to just look down the list until you hit one you didn’t know, and try it.

The categories and names aren’t always completely intuitive for searching purposes, although you will find search works great for those times when you know a certain shortcut exists and just can’t remember it. By clicking the HELP button in the UI you can access a few preferences, including the ability to toggle live search updates. I turned these off since I found that, on my laptop at least, the list didn’t update fast enough for me to keep typing.

I recommend this script for anyone who uses After Effects, whether a beginner trying to get the hang of the workflow, or an expert who thinks there’s nothing new to learn about the application. It’s available as a shareware download from aescripts.com.

Script of the Week: True Comp Duplicator

Note: this is the fourth in a series featuring one After Effects script a week, now appearing at the beginning of each week. For an overview on scripts, check out the debut post.

An astonishing amount of the work that gets done in After Effects is theme and repetition work. You create something, and then there is the need to create 1, 2, 10 or 147 more of them, and for each to be similar yet unique. This generalization clearly applies to motion graphics work, in which pattern forms are part of the deal, but it applies equally well to a visual effects scene with, say, a crowd or a bunch of green screens taken with the same setup.

You can duplicate a comp and re-use it, no problem. But if you’re doing your job correctly in After Effects, that one comp may very well not contain all of your work, but is likely to contain sub-comps that contain all of the detail you’ve put into individual elements. These sub-comps often go three or four layers deep, but when you duplicate the master comp, only that one is duplicated; if you also want the sub-comps to be unique - which, more often than not, you do - you need to do that by hand.

And any time you think that thought when working in After Effects, “I guess I need to do this by hand,” try training yourself to think “I must find a script that does this,” and thank me later. Here is a classic example of a workflow problem, plain and simple, that because of how it is implemented in After Effects, can lead not only to painstaking effort but also careless errors (particularly if you loathe repetitive tasks as much as I do, in which case careless errors are a particular Achilles heel).

In Nuke, when you select a set of connected nodes and copy/paste them, all of the components in the new branch are unique (although the file path to any source footage is also copied over, which is easily repleaced). True Comp Duplicator recreates this behavior in After Effects, treating the elements of a comp like the nodes on that Nuke tree, and does it one better by allowing you to choose how the new names are formed.

Sounds trivial, right? Indispensible is more like it. And if you are clever about naming your files, the result can even automatically increment the duplicates in a way that makes logical sense. The UI for this script (when installed into the ScriptUI Panels subfolder, see the first post in this series for details) lets you specify where in the name to increment and even allows you to replace one text string from the source comp with another, which is as good as a custom script for any nodal compositing app.

This is the first script featured in this series that uses the “Name Your Own Price” scheme on aescripts.com; it is shareware, as are the majority of After Effects scripts, despite the recent trends to serialize the most valuable among them. This means you’re not prevented from grabbing it if you’re in a facility where a purchase order would be required to actually buy it on a deadline, and you’re free to kick a few bucks to the developer at any time to encourage more of these great workflow enhancements to be devised and shared.

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