Trim Compose is a new After Effects script from Video Copilot that helps you work with shots on large projects with many edits:
One of the nice things about doing VFX inside of AE is seeing your shots in sequence to make sure they flow together, but it can get tricky if you start adding hundreds of layers into a single composition as we all know.
A more organized solution is to Pre-Compose each shot into individual compositions and do the work inside. The Trim Compose Script helps make that job fast and easy but wait there’s more. The script automatically takes selected layers and then pre-composes each one into time accurate pre-comps, based on the length of each edit.
You can also use Trim Compose to help create proxies for specific range based on the edit, to batch process shots to work with multiple artists, and add frame handles automatically. Andrew Kramer does the video walk through and offers his own list of other useful workflow scripts for AE.
You can find related functionality in various AE scripts in the Pre-compose collection at AE Scripts. There’s much more on Precomposing, nesting, and pre-rendering in AE Help.
AE Scripts also released a precomp tool recently, Un-PreCompose, “a plug-in for After Effects that allows you to select a pre-comp (nested composition) and extract all of its layers into the parent composition while maintaining each layers effects and other properties.” The demo by plug-in author Jesse Toula of BatchFrame is below. Jesse also released a new script Auto Crop (free) which covers lot of wrinkles; see the video demo below. You can find more on Jesse Toula’s previous projects and tutorials with context at the old AE Portal archive.
Smart Baker is an AE script from Jake & Dan that detect straight linear interpolation and motionless gaps to reduce the number of keyframes when baking expressions into keyframes. You’ll find a variety of other helpful tips and tutorials at their website Createtogether.
