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David Torno
Legend
September 12, 2015
Question

Free Function Friday Release Date Announcement

  • September 12, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 870 views

Back in April of 2013 I began releasing the After Effects ExtendScript Training Series‌ . For over two years many After Effects users have written to me about this series with questions, and thanks for how it has helped them get started. My goal was to make After Effects Scripting accessible to artists who were not programmers, and at the very least provide some kind of better explanation of the scripting process. I am so thankful to all of you for the support and I couldn't have wished for a better result from that series.

Today I am now proud to announce that a spinoff series called Free Function Friday will begin October 2nd, 2015. This series will be a weekly release every Friday morning. Each video episode focuses on a piece (sometimes more than one) of function code to perform a task relating to After Effects. These are all proprietary functions I have developed over the years and have used in variety of scripts at different points. While I am not giving away ALL my secrets (gotta pay for my wedding somehow ), I am happy to share this specific collection with all of you.

Various tasks like collecting all the top level only composition objects in your project, removing unused effects plugins across a project, mirroring your AE project folder setup on the OS side, adjusting keyframed mask positions on a layer, are just a tiny sample of what's to come.

If you are on social media keep an eye out for the hash tags #freefunctionfriday and #fff

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    2 replies

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    David TornoAuthor
    Legend
    October 2, 2015

    Episode 01 getLayerEffects has just been released. Free Function Friday begins now!

    Video: Pro Video Coalition - Free Function Friday getLayerEffects by David Torno

    tardigrade01
    tardigrade01
    Inspiring
    September 16, 2015

    Looking forward to it and thanks again for your excellent series. I will be watching for the adjusting keyframed masks episode especially

    tardigrade01
    tardigrade01
    Inspiring
    September 30, 2015

    Hi David,

    I wanted to thank you for offering the mask adjuster script for free. Nice work. I was wondering if, in your free function Fridays, you go into detail about how you constructed this or other scripts? I have a kind of "special" problem with keyframed masks and transferring said masks from a text file to a layer of that text file that has been converted to an image, and was hoping I might get some more insight on how to manipulate masks from you.

    Thanks!

    D
    David TornoAuthor
    Legend
    October 1, 2015
    I wanted to thank you for offering the mask adjuster script for free.

    Thanks, I'm glad you like it.


    I was wondering if, in your free function Fridays, you go into detail about how you constructed this or other scripts?

    The series will focus on building functions specifically, but I do plan to do and example or two of how to implement some of them into a script throughout the series. As far as Mask Adjuster goes, I will have mask related functions in the series, and keyframe related functions as well. My goal is to have modular functions that you can stack together in a sense to accomplish your full script goal. I wanna keep them flexible enough so they aren't too specific to an overarching job or project. For example, if your goal was to get layer mask data for specific layers, you could easily code all of that into one function, but I would want to have a function that gets layers in general with a comp object argument requirement, and one that gets a layer mask with a layer object argument requirement. This way the function is reusable in any script since it is optimized to focus on that one task. A task that may require a bit of code, that you wouldn't normally do not want to write numerous times within a script.

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