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isosceles.vj
Participant
May 23, 2025
Open for Voting

Automate Tasks with Text-Gen-AI via JSX scripts

  • May 23, 2025
  • 0 replies
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I frequently perform simple tasks in After Effects onto hundreds of comps. There is no batch mode and it wastes ton of time. So I got curious if ChatGPT could generate JSX scripts that could automate these type of tasks for me. The result has been transformational on my workflow. So I'm proposing this feature be added directly into After Effects.

 

Feature Request v1

Imagine a text prompt window in After Effects where the user describes a single task. Then a text-gen-AI creates a JSX script to automate the given task. It'd be ideal to have the generated JSX scripts be saved and displayed within a GUI. Maybe the GUI can also organize, edit, and delete the JSX scripts.

 

Feature Request v2

But this idea could be taken even further. Ever used "Actions" with Photoshop? Well imagine "Actions" but for After Effects. So you could chain together multiple JSX scripts into a single "Action". In this way, you could bring together simple tasks and therefore automate a complex workflow that is specific the the users needs. From there the user selects the relevant comps and then executes the "Action".

 

Examples where I asked ChatGPT to generate a new JSX script for each use-case:

  • Example 1: Within the rotation attribute I had applied a wiggle expression so that I could add in some random motion. After laying out about 454 comps, I realized that each comp was using 10 different wiggle expressions and yet they all shared the same seed value and so the movement was the same within each of the comps. So I used a text-gen-AI to create a JSX script to automate this task. This saved me significant time and avoided doing 4,540 manual edits.
  • Example 2: I had about 240 comps that were utilizing the Echo effect. Yet I needed to extend all of the comps by 150 frames to allow for the echo iterations to finish up. So I used a text-gen-AI to create a JSX script to automatically add 150 frames to the timelines of 240 comps of different lengths.
  • Example 3: I had a comp with 90 layers and each layer had an expression applied to the position, scale, and rotation attributes. I needed to quickly remove the expressions from the selected layers. So I used a text-gen-AI to create a JSX script that would remove the expressions. This allowed me to avoid doing 270 edits to manually remove the expressions from every layer.