Speaking at AENY

UPDATE!
In case you were not able to make it you can watch the presentation courtesy of AENY (make sure to watch it full screen)

If you are in New York City on January 29th I will be speaking at the AENY meeting about using scripts in After Effects to improve your workflow.  Stop by and say hello!

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After Effects CS4 Studio Techniques Book

I am proud to announce that Zorro and BG Renderer are featured in Mark Christiansen’s just released and totally excellent Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques book. This is one of the best books available for After Effects and a must have for intermediate and advanced users. Anybody that takes AE seriously must own this book.

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Throttle 1.2

This is the CS4 update to the popular Throttle script.  It works with the new multi-processing throttle system that was introduced with CS4 that manages how many CPU’s are to be left free for other applications.  This version also adds a little known hidden preference that allows you to set the quality of the Toggle Pixel Aspect Correction button in the Comp View:
 
(After Effects needs to be restarted after changing the PAR quality)

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BG Renderer

BG Renderer is a script that allows you to render your Render Queue items in the background while you can continue working in After Effects. It  runs as an embedable panel that is saved as part of your workspace. This version is compatible with After Effects CS4 and CS3, you can get the AE7 version here. BG Renderer supports multiprocessing (2gb per core is recommended to use this feature) and allows you to control the memory and ram cache for the bg render independently of the main app preferences.

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Zorro-Very Important Update!

I found a very significant cross platform issue with Zorro. When a project is created and tagged with Zorro on one platform, say Mac, and then that same project is opened on Windows, the bullets that are used to identify tags don’t get properly translated. This is an unfortunate side effect of the many cross platform issues that exist when sharing project cross platform but the good news is that there is a simple fix.

First, the tag prefix is changing from the bullet to an asterisk.

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Zorro-The Layer Tagger

Zorro makes selection and isolation sets easy and possible in after effects by adding  tags to layers.  Similar to the way you would tag photos in Flickr, you can tag layers in your comps and then select or isolate those layers in groups by using the tags.

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Load Project or Template at Startup

Based on a request over at the creative cow, this script will launch a project or template every time your start After Effects.  For example, if you have a certain folder/file structure you like to keep for your AE projects, you can setup a virgin project the way you like it and save it as a template by giving it a .aet extension.  Now every time you launch AE your custom setup will be automatically loaded.

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Render Frame at Markers

Based on a request on the AE-List, this script will render (actually send to the render queue) any frames that are marked by layer markers that are within the comp work area.  This would be equivalent to going to a point in time in your comp and selecting “Save Frame As->File”.

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Video Preview Throttle

We are expanding the Throttle family based on a user request to have quick access to the video preview preferences.  You will need to select an Output Device and Output Mode first in  Preferences->Video Preview.  Once you’ve done that you will be able to control the rest of the settings from the script.

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Random Layer Selector

Randomly selects layers. There’s 4 options for how many layers are selected randomly:  You can randomly select most of the layers, many of the layers, not many and finally you can have it randomly select very few of the layers.

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Throttle 1.1

With the 8.0.2 update After Effects introduced 2 very important but not very well publicized or easy to modify preferences that are crucial to proper throttling of AE, so I updated Throttle to include these prefs to make them easy to access and modify. Secondly i removed the purge option since I learned that there is a keyboard shortcut for Purge:   Ctrl-Alt-/ (on number pad) or Cmd-Option-/ on mac.

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Nth Layer Selector

Based on a user request over at the creative cow, Nth Layer Selector will select every Nth layer.  
If you have a set of layers already selected it will select every Nth layer from within that selection otherwise it will select every Nth layer from the whole comp.

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Create Trimmed Adjustment Layer

Based on a user request here on aescripts, CreateTrimmedAdjustmentLayer will create a new Adjustment Layer and trim it to the range of the selected layers.

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Trim to Layer Above & Trim to Layer Below

Based on a request over at http://aenhancers.com Trim to Layer Above will trim the layers that are selected to be the same length as the layer above it. This should be useful for track mattes, glows, tint layers, adjustment layers, difference layers, etc.

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Layer Chain

Based on a request over at aehancers.com this script takes the selected layers and parents each one to the layer above it.

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Layer Handles

Adds a user definable number of frames to the in and out points of the selected layers.

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Layer Random Shifter

Randomly shifts the selected layers in time within user defined range.

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Render, Email, Incremental Save and Shutdown

Based on a request over at http://creativecow.com I joined 2 scripts that come with After Effects and added the Shutdown command when it’s all done.
This script will render all the items in your render queue, send you an email to let you know the render is done, save an incremental version of your project and shutdown the machine.  On Mac you can choose to have the machine sleep instead of shutdown.

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Duplicate Frame Remover

Based on a request over at http://aenhancers.com and using the same engine i built for Magnum this script scans the footage and removes the duplicate frames by setting hold keyframes on the layer’s time-remapping channel. I imagine this could come in handy on roto jobs where the footage has funky pulldown or any other occasion where you need to remove duplicate frames from a clip.

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After Effects 8.0.2 released

The 8.0.2 update which mainly adds OSX “Leopard” support on mac among many bug fixes also adds a new preference which lets you indicate how many processors should be used when the Multiprocessing “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” is on. This is a very welcome addition for BG Renderer users that didn’t have enough RAM to handle all their processors, especially on  8-proc machines which should have a minimum of 16gb of RAM installed. Here’s the official blurb from Adobe:

Multiprocessing performance issues with multi-core machines, especially high-end 8-core hardware. When all 8 cores try to render a complex or memory intensive composition with Render Mutliple Frames Simultaneously, the application can become memory starved if each process has insufficient memory. To remedy this, there is a text preference to control the maximum number of cores that Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously will use. Open the text preference file and look in the ["MP"] section for: “MaxNumberOfProcesses” = “0″. “0″ is the default setting, which disables this preference setting. For better performance on an 8-core machine with 8GB RAM, for example, change the “0″ setting to “4″ and save the preference file and restart After Effects. This restricts multiprocessing with RenderMultiple Frames Simultaneously to 4 cores, each getting approximately 2GB of RAM.

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Magnum - The Edit Detector

This script automatically detects edits in footage. To use it you simply select a footage layer in a comp, set the work area to the region you’d like to find edits and tell Magnum to go to work! Magnum can then split the layer at each edit point or set layer markers where the edits are. It works very well at the default detect level, but tricky footage might need this adjusted.

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Throttle-n-Purge

Now that I find myself working in 32bit more often I found the routine of having to

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Welcome to aescripts.com!

Welcome to AESCRIPTS!  This site is filled with lots of free useful  After Effects scripts written mostly by Lloyd Alvarez but it is also open to anyone who would like to use this site to host their scripts for free.  If you would like to host your after effects scripts here simply drop me an email at lloyd at aescripts dot com.  Hope you like the new site, please feel free to leave me feedback in the comments of this post.

BG Renderer CS 3

This is the CS3 version of the BG Renderer. It now runs as an embedable panel that is saved as part of your workspace. It also utilizes the built in multiprocessing support that was added in CS3. This script takes whatever items are queued and ready in the render queue and sends them to render in the background allowing you to keep working in After Effects.

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BG Renderer for AE7

This script takes whatever items are queued and ready in the render queue and sends them to render in the background allowing you to keep working in After Effects. This script only works with After Effects 7.

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3D Layer Distributor

Super simple script that distributes layers in 3D space within set ranges. (you can set the ranges by editing the script)

Version History:
1.2 Added keyframe and individual axis controls 01/09
1.1 Fixed Random Function 02/08
1.0 Initial Release 07/06

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Layers2Grid

Arranges Selected Layers in a Grid with a choice to arrange them by Rows first (Left to Right) or by Columns first (Top to Bottom). Layers should all be the same size.

Download: Layers2Grid

3D Text Creator

Super simple script that generates text layers and distributes them in 3D space. You can define the words, 3D ranges and color variations by editing the script. The script then asks how many words you like and will loop through your list to create them.

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Color Assigner & Color Ranger

Color Assigner adds a Fill effect to the selected layers and cycles through them and assigns preset colors. Color are defined in float (0..1). Color Ranger applies a color and then varies the hue by a defined range.

Download: Color Assigner |Color Ranger

Project Name Stamp & Info Stamp

Takes the selected Comps and adds a text layer stamp on top with the name of the Project. Project Info Stamp adds the Project Name, Date, Comp Name, Dimensions, PAR & FPS.

Download: Name Stamp | Info Stamp