Automation Blocks - Run Script...

[m1jackson]

The tracking software I use (Syntheyes) exports out .jsx files and creates scenes inside AE. It's great! With Automation Blocks, I'd love to run the script and do a bunch of repetitive tasks after it's imported and clean up the scene.

Is there a way to launch a specific .jsx script from an animation block?

[Mathias Moehl]

Hi Mike,
it is on my feature request list for future versions but not available, yet. The only thing you could do right now is to save a jsx in Ae's scripts folder, such that it shows up in the Ae menu File->Scripts (same as we do for keyboard shortcuts). Then you can use the block Execute Menu Command to execute that script.
Workflow could be
- always keep a script with name say "tempscript.jsx" in your scripts directory (it needs to be there already when you launch Ae such that it shows up in the Ae menu).
- when you need to execute a script overwrite the file tempscript.jsx by that script and execute the menu command "tempscript.jsx".

[m1jackson]

I'll look into this for sure. I'll get thru this one too.

It's always something. <smirk>

[m1jackson]

And in researching this online I came across this from 2 years ago when having an issue with kBar

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/kbar-can-t-quot-run-script-file-quot/td-p/1...

Sooooo.

[Mathias Moehl]

Do you get this when running the menu command from AB? Then I guess at the moment there is no workaround, unfortunately...

[m1jackson · Accepted solution]

Drag, Ok. I do have a workaround for now. I'll very much be looking forward to the next version.

[Mathias Moehl]

That's clever!

I see that it is not ideal, but probably the best thing you can do for now.

[m1jackson]

Hello,

Just wanted to check in on this to see if you've been able to address this in the past year and a half? I did end up with the workaround, but didn't end up working with it since it ended up being unwieldy when in the middle of production.

The script would be so great if "could" work.

Ended up with a "Run Script..." Kbar button that I would just path to thru a file dialog.

Is there any way to have this little bit of script wrap around to make the jsx work?

If you have any new thoughts on this, they'd be greatly appreciated.

Mike

(still not a programmer)

[Mathias Moehl]

I am currently working on a feature to execute arbitrary jsx code from within Automation Blocks. It will be included in the next update. It is coming for both Ae and Pr. Here is a screenshot for Automation Blocks for Pr showing what it will be looking like (for Ae it will look similar, but instead of "Sequence" you will have var types like "Comp" or "Layer"):

Note that in the "execute code" parameter, which in the screenshot just contains a text block, you can plug any other blocks, too. Hence, you could also read the jsx from a file, store it in a variable and then pass this variable content to the "execute code".

[m1jackson]

So much looking forward to this. Thanks for the update!

(any idea on when you'll be putting this out there?)

[Mathias Moehl]

My current estimate would be in a few weeks, depending on whether there are more issues showing up during testing. If you want to participate in the tests, you can also send me an email to info@mamoworld.com 🙂

[Mathias Moehl]

Update: I just published Automation Blocks 1.1.000 which also includes the Execute Code block.

[m1jackson]

So I was able to use the new Execute Code block to get an importer that works great! As always, thank you so much. As with any piece of code, I'm looking at some feature creep.

This creates a handly little dialog that displays the contents of the directory. What I'm now looking to do is shorten this list down to JUST the .jsx files since nothing else is applicable in this dialog.

This is where (as always) my lack of real programming skills doesn't allow me to parse the "list" of files. When printing the output of Track Name I get a comma delinated line of files that I tried writing out to a csv, but the items all showed up in cell A1.

There's got to be a better way! Any assistance you can give, as always, will be appreciated.

[Mathias Moehl]

you can do
1) create an empty list, say with name "filtered list"

2) loop over your list of all files and for each of them do
     if entry ends with jsx add it to the "filtered list"

Now you can pass "filtered list" to your input dialog.