Getting After Effects project properties and metadata programatically

Hi,

I'm building a render-farm and I'd like to extract some of the adobe after effects project fields from an .aep or .aepx file. To me it makes more sense to send the start and end frames to be rendered to each individual machine rather than depend on the shared folder feature. If this is possible, the project metadata in projects saved as xml doesn't seem to contain this information in plain text.

If there is a command line tool that can scan an AE project and print out information such as fps, duration, compositions, that would be perfect.

Thank you,

Conrado