• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Using databases/Excel with expressions

  Posted by Eric Goldstein on May 23, 2011 at 7:57 pm

  Hi,

  Does anyone have any experience/thoughts on incorporating data from an external source with expressions? I’d like to bring in some position, rotation information to apply to a comp.

  Thanks,

  Eric

  Eric Goldstein
  Giraffe Film Company
  Los Angeles
  er**@*********lm.com

  Eric Goldstein replied 14 years, 11 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  May 23, 2011 at 8:09 pm

  Unless you need a live link and the amount of data is really small, a script would probably be much better suited to the job. A script can read a tab or comma delimited spreadsheet file.

  Dan
• 

  Kevin Camp

  May 23, 2011 at 8:28 pm

  you may also be able to hack the clipboard data that you get when you copy keyframes in ae…

  if you paste that keyframe data into a text editor, you can then hack the data, possibly by simply copy/pasting from a spread sheet. then select all in the text editor, copy and then paste that keyframe data into a layer in ae… no scripting necessary.

  how useful that is really comes down to what you need to do… if you have a lot of keyframe data in a spreadsheet that you need on a single layer in ae, this may be pretty effective. if you have to do this for many layers, or as a frequent process then creating a script or expression may be worthwhile.

  here’s a sample of what the clipboard data looks like for position:

  Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data

  Units Per Second 29.97
  Source Width 50
  Source Height 50
  Source Pixel Aspect Ratio 1
  Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio 1

  Transform Position
  Frame X pixels Y pixels Z pixels
  0 0 500 0
  150 500 0 0

  End of Keyframe Data
  

  you would simply modify the data for frame, x, y and z pixels to create new keyframe data, then paste that into a layer in ae (note, you can adjust the tabs if you wanted the data columns to line up correctly, but it’s unnecessary)

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Eric Goldstein

  May 26, 2011 at 1:15 am

  Thank you both for your thoughts. They were very helpful.

  Best,

  Eric

  Eric Goldstein
  Giraffe Film Company
  Los Angeles
  eric@giraffefilm.com

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