Improving Your Workflow With After Effects Scripts

Posted November 10th, 2010 / By John Kostrzewski in Resources, Tutorials

When working on a project, it’s easy to get frustrated with all the tedious tasks that come with your project, and, at times, it may seem that these tasks are taking the fun and creativity out of your project. Fear not, there are shortcuts that can be taken to alleviate yourself from these tasks, and they come in the form of After Effects scripts.

What Are Scripts?

First introduced in After Effects 6.0, scripts are essentially a piece of code based on Javascript that, when executed, tells After Effects to execute one or a series of commands. This may sound very similar to expressions because scripts share many likenesses to expressions, but they also have some drastic differences that set them apart. For example, scripts and expressions are both based on the Javascript programming language and share a lot of the same After Effects-specific syntax; however, scripts only run once when executed (expressions are always running), need to be run again to update if any changes are made to the code (expressions update in realtime), and can control anything outside of a project including project layers, the After Effects user interface or any of the core elements of After Effects (expressions only work within projects).

If you still need to figure out what scripts are, here’s how Adobe defines a script:

A script is a series of commands that tells an application to perform a series of operations. You can use scripts in most Adobe applications to automate repetitive tasks, perform complex calculations, and even use some functionality not directly exposed through the graphical user interface. For example, you can direct After Effects to reorder the layers in a composition, find and replace source text in text layers, or send an e-mail message when rendering is complete.

Basically, a script is code that allows you to temporarily modify After Effects. It allows you to extend the program to do what you want or need it to do.

Where To Get Scripts

There are two ways to get scripts: download and install them or create them yourself (more on this later). Unless you want to spend a lot of time learning Javascript and how to code scripts, I would stick with downloading pre-made scripts. There are a lot of them already out there, and they are either free or very cheap to purchase. The idea here is to save you time, anyway. Even if you do decide you want to learn how to make your own, you can always use these pre-made scripts as a base to learn from.

Here are a few great places to find these excellent After Effects scripts:

AEScripts.com

After Effects Exchange

XScriptorium

CRGreen.com

How To Use Them

I could ramble through how to download, install and execute scripts, but why would I when AEScripts.com has done such a great job already, and they have done it in video format.

Watch the tutorial at AEScripts.com

Writing Scripts

As I have already mentioned, writing scripts is nothing to joke about–it can be a daunting task. With expressions, you at least have the benefit of the pickwhip and the syntax library at your disposal. When writing scripts, you have nothing but your knowledge and trial & error. You have to know Javascript and the After Effects-specific syntax, and then you have to know how to put it all together in a .jsx file for After Effects to read. If all goes well, you will have created a great script that will improve your (and other users) workflow.

Here are a few places you should visit to get a better idea of how to write your first After Effects script:

• Adobe’s Introduction to Scripting

• After Effects Developer Center (Adobe Scripting Guide)

• After Effects Script Help

I can’t express how much a simple script can help you improve your workflow. If you are like me, you probably shied away from scripts because you didn’t know what they really were or how they could help you. Let me just say this: if you have ever run into a situation where you wanted After Effects to perform a certain command or wished it had the option to do a specific task, there’s most likely a script for that. If not, there’s a really good chance that it could be created. If you’re afraid to download and try them, try the scripts that are already included in After Effects: a simple script that emails you when your render is done or one that finds and replaces text in all your project. As soon as you try them you’ll begin to see the possibilities that scripts have to offer when working within After Effects.

John Kostrzewski is the Editor of Fuel Your Motionography and a freelance motion graphics and visual effects artist, videographer and writer living in Minnesota. He is awesome. Follow him on Twitter at and .