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No Admin Access? Install AE Scripts Anyway!
November 10, 2020
Common freelance issue: you’re working in-house at some studio (or, in Covid times, remotely logging into a studio’s workstation), and you don’t have admin access to the computer– how are you going to install all of your favourite scripts, presets, and extensions?! Little known fact: on both MacOS and Windows, Adobe’s actually given us specific folders to install anything we’d like that doesn’t need Admin access. That’s right: you can stroll into Buck with your favourite scripts and install them…
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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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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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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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