action in AE
by Matt Walker
on
Mar 31, 2008 at 8:35:25 pm
I've got a complicated project in AfterEffects that needs to change on a daily basis. In all, there are about 30 1-2 second renders that will need to be done each day and it is very tedious. Is there a way to create an action in AE like in Photoshop?
Re: action in AE by Dave LaRonde on Mar 31, 2008 at 8:50:18 pm
You can do something like that with text, but I don't know of any good way to to it for other stuff short of writing your own script. I'd guess it depends on what you have in mind to do.
Re: action in AE by Bill Kelly on Apr 1, 2008 at 9:37:00 am
Well Dave, teamwork works in this case. I don't know how to do it for text, but I think I can help somewhat on the other part.
Start a new project and call it Master Project or something like that. Import all your other projects that change daily into the master project. Now, instead of opening a whole bunch of projects and making changes, you just have to open one.
Make the changes in each of the projects and send them to the Render Que after you make each change. When you're done with all the changes you'll have a whole Render Que of them. Click the Render button and they'll all render out.
Much better than opening each individual project, making the change, rendering it out, opening the next project, etc. etc.
Re: action in AE by Bill Kelly on Apr 1, 2008 at 9:40:50 am
Actually, I just re-read Matt's post. I misread and thought you had 30 different projects. Well, anyway, it's a good method for doing batch rendering if anyone needs to do it.
Re: action in AE by david bogie on Apr 1, 2008 at 3:21:32 pm
> In all, there are about 30 1-2 second renders that will need to be done each day and it is very tedious.
Without knowing what those renders are and what filters are involved there really isn't any way for us to start throwing out much except guesses.
Tedium is part of the workflow when doing daily setups. You can create proxies that can be created externally and automatically updated from AE. You can create a publish-and-subscribe function from within Bridge. But none of these overly sophisticated and terribly glitch-happy hacks will make it any less tedious to do the rendering if the elements in the layer change or the filters must be tweaked. Like distributed rendering, the overhead in trying to automate AE functions usually is far more expensive than simply keyboarding the changes manually.
If you're not really changing anything, and you do not indicate that anything really changes in these short layers, simply pre-render all of them as movies and reimport them.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: action in AE by Nate Hanson on Apr 1, 2008 at 3:45:54 pm
This is an interesting post and it makes me wonder if there are ways to make AE pull data from a file for dynamic changes to projects. Can AE interract with data files in any way?
For example, could you have a text file with dates and corresponding quotes that AE could read and update the project with? That way you could just re-render your project each day and it would have different text.
If AE can't do that...shouldn't they add that as a feature? Seems like you guys in the industry would need that sort of function.
