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Geoff Vane
Known Participant
October 9, 2020
Question

.AEPX manipulation of footage paths

  • October 9, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 343 views

I am using VB.net to manipulate .aepx files. This works great at home. I can replace the path of a default footage file and Encoder will render the file with updated footage. It doesn't matter where the footage resides: if I fill in the correct path in the .aepx file the footage is found and rendered by Encoder.


At work the situation is different. Suddenly the updated footage can't be found by Encoder. After Effects has no problem finding it. Encoder just shows color bars.

Any clue what is going wrong?
 

(I know AEPX files are depreciated but this is the only technique I can use to get what I want with my limited programming skills.)

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
October 10, 2020

Without any info about your file paths, footage types, system info and whatnot nobody can tell you much. This may not at all have anything to do with the footage not being found, but could simply be a botched CoDec, problems with hardware acceleration functions in AME, weird stuff with the caches or something else entirely.

 

Mylenium

G
Geoff VaneAuthor
Known Participant
October 11, 2020

I found the filepaths can't take ' and &. That needs to be translated to the XML standard.
Furthermore and most important, I found that if the dummy file was a JPG, you are stuck with JPG.|
Same goes for PNG. Whatever format the dummy file was in AE, you are stuck with that format.
The code of the file format is hidden somewhere in hex.

I could try hunt that down but I am too lazy.
I will add each common file format available to our crew: jpg, png and bmp.
Those images will be 1 pixel dummies.
The targetted format image will get replaced by my code. 
Each image will have an expression to examine itself and see if its size is still 1 pixel. If so, be invisible.
This is a crude version:




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