Automation Blocks - Export single PNG of selected compositions

[Citizen_Sam]

Hello, @Mathias Moehl !

After nearly two years of exceptional productivity with Automation Blocks for Premiere, we've purchased a few licenses for the After Effects version.

Loving the spreadsheet functionality. So much potential.

At the moment, I'm trying to write a script that exports a single png of the last frame of all the selected compositions.

I made one that sets the work area to one frame and then outputs a png sequence (resulting in only one png). My concern there is that when my team goes to render the full .mov, they'll accidently render only one frame.

I added a block to the script that resets the work area after sending the .png to the render queue. Unfortunately, if you do that before hitting render, you'll get a .png sequence of the entire work area.

So... is there a way to write a script that saves a single frame .png of a chosen frame of all selected compositions?

[Mathias Moehl]

Great to heat that Automation Blocks is. such a great help for you.

In the Render Settings templates of Ae, you can specify the time span.  You have the options:

- length of comp

- workarea only (yes, that's wokarea at time when you start the render)

- custom time

Unfortunately, there is no way to create render settings dyamicallly (otherwise that would be the clean solution - to create render settings with a custom time range, independent of the workarea).

Some workarounds:
1) Send to Adobe Media Encoder instead of rendering in Ae. When sending to AME, Ae creates a copy of the Ae project, so for the queued entry the workarea should stay the same, even if in your original project it is changed before you actually render.
2) for exporting the single frame, create a new comp (let's call it "single frame render comp") and insert into it the original comp as precomp. Then you can either set the workarea of that new comp or also change the duration of that new comp to a single frame. Then if the content of the original comp changes, your "single frame render comp" updates its content, too, but if your original comps workarea changes, it does not affect. the "single frame render comp".
You could even have a time remap expression on the precomp layer, to ensure it always shows the last frame, even if the duration of the original comp changes.