Mike King

Mini AE pipeline for home

July 16, 2011 on 9:31 pm | In Animation, CG Pipeline | Comments Off

Feeling pretty good about getting my Mac setup with a mini-pipeline for After Effects.

I’m putting together 2min 30sec of motion graphics for an opening title sequence for How Do You Write A Joe Schermann Song.

It’s been a couple months working just with the Mac interface and it’s finally become too unwieldy. There are just too many shots, and I’m spending too much time thinking about naming conventions and copying files around every time I set up a new shot.

So I spent the last few days writing Python code to give me a faster way to do things. It’s not set up for multiple users, since it’s just me. But it wouldn’t be too hard to fix that if the need arises.

Currently I’ve got my files split between 2 drives. The work files, like the AE projects, live in my home directory under a Projects folder. Images, movies, and other media live on an external 2TB drive.

My pipeline scripts help manage naming conventions and provide short cuts for things I do a lot.

So now I can do stuff like do stuff like this from the command-line:

#switch working environment to a particular project
setshow jss

# make a new shot
mkshot <seq> <shot>
mkshot ovrt 1


# navigate to a shot's working directory giving a sequence name and shot number
nav --shot <seq> <shot>

# navigate to a shot's movie directory
nav --media <seq> <shot>

# of course aliases are helpful for these
ns
nm

# and once you've nagivated, it remembers the seq & shot so you can omit them to quick jump around
ns ovrt 1 # go to ~/Project/jss/ovrt/001.00
nm # jump to /data/Media/jss/ovrt/001.00
ns # jump back to ~/Project/jss/ovrt/001.00

# setup task-specific directories with a sequence-specific template project that live in /share
setup  <task>
setup ae # creates an "ae" folder and creates a starting AE project file
setup --shot 1 --seq ovrt ae

# start after effects from the command-line
ae <filename>
ae ovrt_001.00.aep

# render an after effects project in batch
render_ae  <filename>


I’m starting to use git to manage revisions of my After Effects project files. It’s actually using less space than maintaining copies via naming convention. Plus this way I can experiment with alternate ideas and use git branches to manage them. For now I’m going to use raw git, since I know how to use it. But I can see writing some wrappers that would be helpful.

It’s all a bit hard coded for now so that I can get back to making pictures. I feel like it wouldn’t take too much more work to clean it up so that I can use this code as a base for future projects.