How to run scripts in After effects without running it manually.

[Wildchildstudios]

I want to render multiple composition in a single file but it has to render specific composition which will be controlled through JSON. This has to be done automatically through scripts without running it manually.

[Arie Stavchansky]

Hi there! 👋🏼

Not sure if this will help, but you can use Templater from Dataclay to achieve this.  Specifically you can use Templater Pro or Templater Bot editions.

You can have your JSON file be an array of objects where each has a "target" property key that specifies which project composition you want AE to render out automatically.  This "target" property key's

value specifies the composition by name.  Then, when processing the JSON file, Templater will process that specific composition to be rendered out.

You can learn more about it at https://dataclay.com/templater 

[Ivan Senic]

You can check out Plainly Videos (https://plainlyvideos.com).

Basically you would upload an After Effects project to Plainly web-app and then you can select which compositions you want to render and if you want to change any specific layer property. For example, you can select to change texts, images, colors, control values, etc. And then when subbmitting a render, you would provide parameters as JSON.

The good thing is the autiomation support. You can connect Plainly  to a bunch of tools, so you can completly avoid triggering renders manually as you descibed.

[Krishna Kumar22556352ieq8]

@Ivan Senic  is there way or anything api or tools or scripts or anything to extract layers, comps information in browser. how to do it?

[Arie Stavchansky]

@Krishna Kumar22556352ieq8 You might want to look into something like nexrender which is an open source project.  Plainly is built atop that tool so you'll have some insight into what is acheivable there.

[Ivan Senic]

Yes, originally it was built on top of nexrender, however this is not the case anymore. And while nexrender is an awesome project and should be checked-out, Plainly feature set is way bigger and has some advantages:

• You don't have to maintain rendering infrastucture on your own, but it's included out-of-the box including the cloud-based storage.
• There is a web-based UI where the complete team can collaborate together, with easy way to setup everything even for somebody who is not an After Effects designer.
• There is a full-blown HTTP API, and bunch of native integrations with other tools.
• Plus it solves a bunch of everyday challendges: auto-retries on AE errors (and we all know about those), media & text autoscaling, conditional layer management, batch rendering, etc.

[Krishna Kumar22556352ieq8]

thanks for replay dear it means a lot to me. And nexrender i check but this functionality is not there @Arie Stavchansky  where in browser we extract data of .aep file like layers and comps details without needs a  aerender or after effects ui. like this one aep-parser  >> https://pypi.org/project/aep-parser/ . where i can see layers and comps  in browser. is there way around without heavy processing via aerender or via extended script for this work?

[Ivan Senic]

Yes, once you upload your project you can create a new Plainly template in the Web app and there you will see all layers. It looks something like this:

[Krishna Kumar22556352ieq8]

thank for replay @Ivan Senic. I have my own app where it automatically replaces the ae layers and images and audio and i want is this functionality where in browser or server side i can extract data of the layers easily without heavy work like palinly does. @Ivan Senic  it will be great help if you provide any resources on this. thanks in advance dear.

[Ivan Senic]

I am affraid then you need to write your own JSX script and pull that into the aerender executable. And the script can then do what ever yoour business logic requires.