Ep. 25 applyPluginEffect Free Function Friday

Welcome to episode 25 of the Free Function Friday series. Today’s function will help you apply a plugin effect to a collection of layers within a project. All you will need to supply the function is an array collection of layer objects, and the name of the plugin you want to apply. Since we are dealing with plugin effects, another helpful resource for this function will be plugin match names. A match name is a custom name that the plugin developer creates that will remain the same behind the scenes regardless of what language After Effects is running in. This is good for helping maintain compatibility for your scripts across different markets. To get you started, here are a few links to some lists of match names.

My old original list:
AE I Owe You: AE Plugin Matchnames

Jeff Almasol has a CC stock plugin list:
Jeff Almasol: Redefinery

One of the earlier episodes of Free Function Friday can also be used to obtain a list. Today’s video explains how to modify this code:
Free Function Friday getThirdPartyFX

If you haven’t done so already there is a Free Function Friday introduction video located here that has some important information pointing to a few resources that will come in handy when scripting for After Effects.

Episode 25 applyPluginEffect:

Legal note: The Adobe ExtendScript code talked about in this article and accompanying embedded video(s), and/or graphic images are not guaranteed to be compatible with every version of After Effects. David Torno, ProVideo Coalition, and Diversified will not be held liable for any misuse or incorrect use of the provided ExtendScript code. Use at your own risk.

All of the code I provide in this series, has been created and tested in After Effects CC 2014. Unless otherwise specified in the episode, the code should be compatible with After Effects CS6 through CC 2015. I’ve done my best to avoid depreciated code (code that Adobe removed at some point), and made these functions as compatible as possible. There will however be the occasional piece of code that is brand new as of a certain version of After Effects and therefore will not be backwards compatible from that version. I will mention these if that is the case.

With that said, all the code I provide in this series is open source and free to use in your scripts. I highly encourage you to expand and improve upon the code I provide and start making your own custom functions as well, but please do not repost the code I show in this series as is and claim it as your own. If you use any of the code provided in this series please give credit where credit is due. This series is meant to provide, what I feel is useful code, as well as to hopefully further explain ExtendScript and it’s quirks. While the functions we build throughout this series can perform a task all on their own, they are not meant to be a solo script. How you combine them together and expand upon them is when you will gain the most from these functions.