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Inspiring
February 3, 2017
Question

quit then relaunch AE with script

  • February 3, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1095 views

hi people

Would anyone know how to quit and then relaunch After Effects using a script. I've tried most everything I can think of including using BridgeTalk from within ESTK but I can't get anything to work.

basically what I need to do is launch AE, open a project, render what's in the queue, quit After effects, and then repeat...  I can manage to get it all happening except for the application launch.

any suggestions greatly appreciated.

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2 replies

Known Participant
February 4, 2017

maybe you can use aerender.exe inside the application folder to finish your work

Mathias Moehl
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 3, 2017

The question is what kind of script it should be and by which host app it should be run. If it is an Ae script, it will stop running when you quit After Effects (a script cannot continue to run without its host).

What you could do is to have another kind of script (for example a local node.js script) and let this script open Ae and execute other Ae scripts. I haven't tried it, yet, but this could be helpful if you want to try the approach with a node.js script: after-effects

Mathias Möhl - Developer of tools like BeatEdit and Automation Blocks for Premiere Pro and After Effects
tardigrade01
Inspiring
February 3, 2017

have you considered using a shell script in terminal? e.g.

osascript -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2017" to activate' -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2017" to DoScriptFile "yourscript.jsx"' -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2017" to quit' -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2017" to activate'

and so on? you could actually include app.quit() in whatever script file you do, and then put something like above in a loop based on how many items you are rendering...