After Effects Batch Renderer

[DavidStark]

This is for people who use Adobe After Effects a lot.

You can queue up multiple projects and have it render them all for you at once. I am using it because I have 5 projects that each take an hour to render, so I will just leave it at work overnight rendering.

I wrote it pretty quickly.... Haven't added many features just what I need to use it for.

Feel free to download it, or request any features.

*******NOTES ON USAGE********

1. You MUST have the render queue set up for each project BEFORE you click the run button on the batch renderer.

2. All paths to the .aep projects, including the name of the .aep project, can NOT have spaces in them otherwise aerender.exe will fail.

3. The path for the script to run aerender.exe is the default path when installing After Effects. If for some reason aerender.exe cannot be found you may have to manually change this path. I can add the option to browse for the aerender.exe path though.

***********

Let me know what you think!

After Effects Batch Renderer.au3

Edited May 9, 2013 by DavidStark

[careca]

Hi, nice job, i do have a question, what's with the spaces? Why it cannot have any spaces? It should always be possible to have a path with spaces.

Also, why not _GUICtrlListView_GetItemCount and _GUICtrlListView_GetItemText to retrieve the text?

Edited May 8, 2013 by careca

[DavidStark]

Also, why not _GUICtrlListView_GetItemCount and _GUICtrlListView_GetItemText to retrieve the text?

Hmm, it was only today that I figured out how to use and control List and ListView.

I will check into those functions tommorow.... Will they reduce the size of some of the lines? I feel like the functions used easily get me the desired result, but again, I will look into it.

Hi, nice job, i do have a question, what's with the spaces? Why it cannot have any spaces? It should always be possible to have a path with spaces.

aerender.exe is a command line interface for After Effects, when you pass aerender.exe a path with spaces in it it cannot correctly parse it and results in a syntax error. It looks at the space as another parameter. Do you know of a way around this? I dont....

Thanks for the input!

Edited May 8, 2013 by DavidStark

[BrewManNH]

Have you tried surrounding the path with quotes?

[careca]

I don't think it would reduce lines, but they seem simpler functions to me.

The way around it, is to enclose everything with quotes, often i check if the final path is good with a msgbox or tooltip.

[James]

Regarding the spaces, try Bowmores suggestion of quotes, or place a in front of each space. So " " would become " " without the quotes.

[DavidStark]

Have you tried surrounding the path with quotes?

Ok I will try the quotes first.... This means that I have to double quote inside of the RunWait() correct?

For example "-project ""C:my project.aep"""

place a in front of each space. So " " would become " " without the quotes.

I want to avoid having to process each line and place a in front of it.... Rather than do that I would probably just do a FileMove() where I move and rename the file to something without spaces in it. It would keep all of the same attributes as the original file, it would just be a temporary that I use to render. Seems like that would be much easier.

I don't think it would reduce lines, but they seem simpler functions to me.

The way around it, is to enclose everything with quotes, often i check if the final path is good with a msgbox or tooltip.

How do you mean check if the path is good? Just have it display the path and make sure there are not any extra spaces or characters?

[careca]

Yes, just to debug.

[DavidStark]

Just to recap:

Also, why not _GUICtrlListView_GetItemCount and _GUICtrlListView_GetItemText to retrieve the text?

These functions were much easier. Not that they saved lines or space, but are much simpler and more readable.

Have you tried surrounding the path with quotes?

I am not too familiar yet with using command-line interfaces. This worked, you can now use any path.

Often i check if the final path is good with a msgbox or tooltip.

I SplashTextOn() before starting the render to tell the path thats going to be rendered and show the command-line string..... I guess this was more for debugging and I could take it out now.

I also added a checkmark for multiprocessing and to make a sound when the render is finished. Added a column for progress on the list, showing which one it is currently on, and the time it took to render the finished projects.

I want to work on something where you could maybe choose the output module and path for each project, like have a different listview with the information of the selected project. Not sure how I would do this though.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR HELP!

Any more suggestions?

Check out the new one I've uploaded...