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AE Expressions Resources
February 7, 2019
Similar to my post on scripting, this is intended to be a roundup of a bunch of resources for learning expressions. I’m focusing less on specific tutorials and more on broader-picture materials. Like scripting, AE expressions are based on Javascript. However, as of AE 16.0+ (CC2019), AE now has a new expression engine that lets you use modern Javascript, not just the ancient ExtendScript system! Looking for scripting resources? Check out this post! Learning Javascript Eloquent Javascript, by Marijn Haverbeke…
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Visual Studio Code Stuff
May 19, 2018
At this point, the majority of my work is in developing scripts for Adobe After Effects. The language used here (Extendscript) is a fork of ES3 from 1999. It’s old. This means that we’re limited to very, very vanilla javascript when we develop, with polyfills or helper libraries taking a lot of the headache out of this process. I use Visual Studio Code as my one and only code editor. Apart from providing a wonderful development experience, you can sort of…
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Freelance Profit & Loss
January 25, 2018
I’m one of those people who feel that sharing is caring. If people in general were more willing to share their rates, income, and business practices, it would be much easier for others to earn a fair salary, and artists would find stability much faster than they do now. To that end, I’ve shared spreadsheets for a few years which detail my freelance profit and loss amounts, including invoice breakdowns, tax installment payments (when applicable), and all expenses. Here’s a…
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AE Scripting Resources
November 1, 2017
Often I’ll get asked about how you can learn AE scripting; what sites, resources, reference materials exist out there? After giving the same set of links every time, I wanted to collect them all in a single place that I’ll try to keep up to date. A few things to note: ExtendScript, the language that Adobe scripts are written in, is a version of Javascript. This means that a lot of the time, you can look up general Javascript reference…
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Extendscript Toolkit: Setting default document text
May 11, 2017
When I use ESTK, I always want to start with the same foundation, setting up an IIFE so I can play and not fuck with AE/ESTK global scope. For this example, the snippet below is what I want to start with. Note: This involves editing ESTK Required files. Edit at your own risk! These files are located here on Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit CC\Required Method 1: Prepopulate temp file on Startup 01startup.jsx, line 246 If you only want…
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CEP: Logging Errors
October 3, 2016
When working on Flow, we were looking for a way to log standard JS console errors to a file, so that if something broke we’d be able to quickly diagnose the problem and fix it in a patch. Straightforward enough! However, as the CEP standard is evolving, we found that there was some discrepancy in behaviors between different versions of AE with respect to how to enable logging and where the log files are saved. With any luck, this can help. The CEP documentation mentions that there are many Chromium Command Line Switches…
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Download: Per-Version AE Icons for Windows
July 21, 2016
Because I write scripts, I keep a whole bunch of different versions of After Effects installed. This can get a little unwieldy, considering the icons don’t change much between versions! With this in mind, I quickly whipped up some alternate AE icons for Windows (I don’t know much about icons on MacOS, so no idea what size/formats are needed, sorry!). They’re fairly pixely, just trying to keep the same dimensions and form factor of the existing. In the zip, there…
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Preset: Shape Layer Inner Stroke
August 3, 2015
Shape Layers. Strokes. You know how they work– add a stroke, and it’ll increase in width both internally and externally from the path. But what if you want to preserve the outer edge of your path, adding strokes internally only (a la Illustrator?)
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Preset: Point on a Circle
In a throwback to Points Along A Line from several years back, here’s a quick expression for ya– “Point on a Circle.” Straightforward, yeah? Yeah.
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ExtendScript: Delete Saved Settings
July 22, 2015
Working in ExtendScript and need to delete a setting you’ve saved to your users’ preferences file? Did some looking around and it seems there was no way. Until now! Found that you can use the method to delete settings. Just need to target it with the prefix “Settings_”, and save the prefs file afterward, but otherwise seems to work just fine. The only caveat here is that the section header will remain, however that seems to have no negative effect. var sectionTag = “testSectionTag”; var…
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