Workflow tips needed for setting up headless script (-noui)

[Byron Nash]

My client is asking for me to create a script that can execute from Photoshop without showing the AE UI at all. For those that have created headless workflows, what tips and tricks can you recommend?

When running a script with noui, how can you tell when it's done, especially if there is a render involved?

[Arie Stavchansky]

If there is a render involved, you can just output a console message with $.writeln() directly after the line where you call the .render() method on the render queue.  Or, you'll see that the render is finally output, so you can check the existence of a file.

[punchme0088]

hi all,

I actually have similar questions as well. We have a Java process that will kick off AfterEffect thru the command line "afterfx.com -noui -r myscript.jsx" to perform a render job. This method runs perfectly fine when someone actually login on the window's machine and kick off the java process.

However the whole thing runs to a crawl when we started configure the java process to run as a windows service (under the same user that we would use to normally kick off the process interactively thru live login). I can see from the task manager after effect did tries to spawn multiple processes to do the render job that was feed to it thru the myscript.jsx. But those child process would die almost instantly and then AfterEffect process would sit idle for like a minute or two before slowly perform the rendering single threaded.

Anyone here tried and successfully kick off the aftereffect process from a windows' service?

Thanks,

Joseph