After Effects

Overview

Automate Adobe After Effects — the industry-standard motion graphics and compositing tool. This skill covers ExtendScript for programmatic project manipulation, CEP panel development, expressions for procedural animation, aerender CLI for headless batch rendering, MOGRT template automation, data-driven graphics, and production pipeline integration. Build repeatable workflows for social media content, broadcast graphics, and VFX pipelines.

After Effects is commercial software; scripts and aerender need a licensed install (render-only machines can run aerender without signing in, see Step 5).

Instructions

Step 1: Scripting Approaches

1. ExtendScript (.jsx / .jsxbin) — Full project DOM access, runs inside AE
2. Expressions — JavaScript evaluated per frame on a single property
3. CEP panels — HTML/JS panels that call ExtendScript through CSInterface.evalScript
4. aerender — Command-line renderer (headless)
5. UXP plugins — Adobe documents an After Effects UXP API (require("aftereffects"), same object model) as a beta with minimum version 27.0; the released app is 26.5, so ship CEP + ExtendScript today