add ability to drag and drop effect animation presets into (shared) adobe libraries

Report · Apr 26, 2023

Hello,

I am a composite supervisor working mostly on animated TV shows.

our process means grading and effecting long strings of shots with sequence specific repeating effects and setups. We work with large and small teams of artists around the world.

We would absolutely love the ability to drag and drop an effect or a stack of effects from a layer to a shared library so it becomes automatically available to our artists around the wolrd.

This would be a big boost for speed and reliability of our collaborative process.

Right now it's "possible" through the classic system of saving an animation preset file then sharing that via mail or chat, then installing etc, or sending a zipped comp collect, but that's a lot of obsolete slow footwork. We could just slide animation presets to/from library straight off/from layers and comps. It would seem you already have the hardest bits of the backend already built in the adobe libraries system, it would just be a matter of figuring out a file type ?

Ideally this could contain layer properties, keyframes and plugins, the luxury version would be to include the ability to drag in a whole comp or precomp and include its dependencies

Report · Apr 26, 2023

I don't know if this will help. I have created an alias to a Dropbox folder in the normal Adobe-generated folder for effects and presets. I have several computers and several colleagues that are sharing the folder. On a Mac, the path is Documents/Adobe/After Effects 2023/User Presets. I've got a couple hundred of them. All of my clients have access to the presets by setting up the same kind of Alias on their machines.

I also have access to any of the animation presets I have created when I am working on a client's machine as long as I have access to the Internet. I don't create the alias; I just browse the web for the preset and download it.

You can use about any file-sharing system to do this. The trick is the Alias.

Report · Apr 27, 2023

thank you Rick for sharing this, this is a nice workaround.

I was pondering about a solution like this yesterday using aliases to automate that, will think about implementing this with our shared filesystems.

I started using adobe libraries for projects last september, using it for reference materials and animation reuse in pre-rendered form - while its current limitations are frustrating (filesize, file formats very limited), I can see how it could be incredibly powerful if it's expanded just a bit for AE specific needs - share relevant libraries directories with team members without effort, easy to organize directories, easy to add, easy to use, accomodates several needs and content type. Easy and flexible is the key word here, just wish it was more. For the type of files it can contain now, they are always available at the tip of my pointer and that is making work a lot faster.

I do hope it gets develloped because it seems all the important functionality is already built in and now it just needs to be expanded a bit, and I do like that it is wrapped into the programs themselves - if you are running AE (or PSD or adobe stuff) you do not need a secondary cloud filesystem, which is prety great. That library panel is now part of my default workspace 100 percent of the time.