After Effects Feature Request – Auto restart

[Rob Frese]

I hear you — I want this feature too. Esp for me when I do lipsyncing and am constantly rendering and re-rendering tons of audio / animations, my RAM fills up quickly and I need to close and relaunch AE a lot (purge command is NOT the same as fully closing and starting AE).

I’m trying to do this via scripting. I can get it to work when I launch the script from ExtendScript Toolkit, but if I launch the script from AE, AE just crashes.

This is the current script. I’m trying to figure out a way to get AE to launch the script outside of itself, so it won’t crash, but not sure if that’s possible.

var thefile = new File(*whatever project file I want the script to re-open*);

aftereffects.quit();
$.sleep(3000)
thefile.execute();

[Rob Frese]

Actually just figured this out — run this script from After Effects and it’ll close AE and reopen the same project that was open when it closed. Only tested this on Windows 7 / AE CC 14. Note that this script will open and close ESTK while it’s running (it has to run itself FROM ESTK, not from AE).


// get current AE project, close AE, then reopen that same project
var bt = new BridgeTalk ();
bt.target = 'estoolkit'
bt.body = 'var result; var bt0 = new BridgeTalk(); bt0.target = "aftereffects"; bt0.body = "app.project.file;"; bt0.onResult = function(resObj){result = resObj.body}; bt0.send(); $.sleep(1000); var theFile = new File(result); aftereffects.quit(); $.sleep(1000); theFile.execute();'
bt.send();

// quit ESTK (opened as a result of above)
var bt2 = new BridgeTalk();
bt2.target = 'estoolkit'
bt2.body = 'app.quit();'
bt2.send();