Adobe 12040118 Using Help - Page 3

Help Using Help Overview Overview Back 3 The Adobe After Effects 6.5 Render Automation & Scripting Guide demonstrates how to take procedural control of your After Effects projects via scripting. This feature set is available only in Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional Edition. With the use of system-level scripting, you can streamline your render pipeline and avoid a lot of repetitive pointing and clicking. If you have used expressions or other JavaScript-like techniques for animating, or worked with system scripting in AppleScript or Visual Basic, you will recognize the power of application scripting in After Effects. With some practice, and with sufficient experience using the JavaScript language, you can take control of your graphics pipeline. If you know nothing about scripting After Effects 6.5 is a visual tool with a graphical user interface; you are used to interacting with it via interface elements such as menus, palettes and icons. For the most part, this is the most accessible way to work. Scripting is designed for situations in which this methodology involves tedious repetition or painstaking searching and sorting that could be automated. It is also useful for leveraging the power of networked rendering in situations where Watch Folder is less powerful (and less convenient to set up). Scripting is designed to help users of After Effects get past these types of obstacles, and it is available even to users who have no inclination to learn the JavaScript language. If you are this type of user, you can still harness the power of scripting via third party solutions such as Rush Render Queue, a graphical user interface to set up distributed renders from any computer on the network without having to set up on individual machines. You can also leverage the contributions of scripting users who share scripts with other users. Larger studios may have such users in-house, while other users can visit forums such as those found at www.adobeforums.com. After Effects objects You may not think of After Effects as a collection of hierarchical objects, but when you make use of render queue items, compositions, and projects, that is how they appear in scripting. Just as the expressions features in After Effects give you access to virtually any property of any layer inside any composition of your project (each of which we refer to as an object), scripting gives you access to the hierarchy of objects within After Effects and allows you to make changes to these objects. After Effects scripting is based on ECMAScript (or more specifically, the 3rd Edition of the ECMA-262 Standard). Further documentation on this standard can be found at www.ecma-international.org. Expressions and motion math Because scripting can access individual layer properties, and because it utilizes JavaScript, one might assume that expressions and scripting are one and the same. However, they are two entirely distinct entities. Expressions have no ability to access information from scripts (such as variables and functions), although a script can be written to create or edit an expression. The similarity between expressions and scripting is, however, apparent in that they are both drawn from the same language, ECMA standard JavaScript. Thus, knowing how to utilize one is helpful in understanding the other. Using Help Back 3