After Effects Scripts
Adobe After Effects gained scripting capabilties since verion 6.0; immeasurably increasing the power behind this already superb application. For someone like me, working with interactive DVDs, these scripting features are a real boon, allowing literally thousands of individual screen assets to be rendered out overnight by automatically linking designers templates with producers Excel sheets – something which previously took a small team of junior designers a week to manually complete.
The nature of After Effects scripting means that most of my scripts are one-offs, easy to write quickly for the job at hand and discard afterwards. However there have been a few which proved interesting or useful enough for me to ‘finish off’ a bit more than the others and share with you here. So far we have:
- Automatic Overlay Animator – You’ll never look at subtitles the same way again!
- Multi-Render – Easy tool for rendering compositions in multiple formats.
- Explore.jsx – A script to reveal the methods and properties of objects in the AE DOM.
- SearchAndReplace.jsx – Project-wide text search and replace
If you interested in learning more about After Effects scripting, I can heartily recommend the forum aenhancers.com which is host to an active and helpful community of scripters at all levels.