Ep. 01 getLayerEffects Free Function Friday

Welcome to Free Function Friday, a new series that dives further into the Adobe After Effects scripting language, ExtendScript. Each Friday morning, I will be releasing a new video tutorial explaining a different custom function that I’ve built and used in my own scripts over the years. I will also show a few examples along the way of how to combine and implement some of these functions into your own scripts to hopefully make your script coding easier.

Free Function Friday is a spin-off of my original scripting video tutorial series from 2013, which can be found here: After Effects ExtendScript Training. If you are new to After Effects script writing or Javascript, I would highly recommend that you begin there first for a fairly comprehensive explanation. It has over fourteen hours worth of video content, and can be a very helpful resource before taking on the use of the functions we will build in this series.

Before we begin the first episode I would like to invite you to watch this introductory video overview about ExtendScript functions. It will give you a base understanding of what they are, how important they can be in your scripts, and how they can be implemented into your scripts. It’s important to understand how these can be used, because if a function is implemented improperly, they can effect other scripts that are running in After Effects. This can cause odd behavior in After Effects sometimes, and be difficult to track down the cause of the issue. Once you are familiar with the general rules it’ll be easier to make full use of a script function.

Free Function Friday Introduction:

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.

Episode 1 getLayerEffects:

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.