Exporting a sequence with layers to Photoshop

[Walter Soyka]

What’s the Ps Action you need to perform? Maybe there’s a good way to do that part directly in After Effects.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Wilkie Branson]

Its an action which converts the background and a painted brush layer into a sketch. the action has about 400 stages so even if AE could achieve the same steps i think it might be pretty difficult to write it and achieve similar results…. unfortunately.

[Walter Soyka]

Understood. Your best bet is probably to install Ae CC 2014 (your Creative Cloud license entitles you to install older versions, too) and use fnord ProEXR to output the sequence. You can save your work in a later version of Ae down to CC 2014 via File > Save as… > Save a copy as CC (13), as long as you’re not relying on newer functionality in the project.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Richard Garabedain]

I know right..youd think the flow between the two would be a little better. I have only one solution that i have done myself…you can import a sequence into photoshop, but you have to do the effects manually! So i used actions. I set my f6 to record the action of duplicating the images 3 times, doing different effects to each image, and merging them back together into one layer, and export back into a folder. All this was 1 action..so on each image i hit f6 and then went to the next frame.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Why does Composition>Save Frame As Photoshop Layers not work?

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[Wilkie Branson]

Thanks all, thats a good idea, i’ll try rolling back to cc2104 and using EXR’s with layers, as far as i can run the work flow through in my head it should work!

using export frame to Photoshop works perfectly.. except for the fact that it requires you to export each frame manually which is obviously not a sensible option when you have 10s of thousands of frames to export. as mentioned above it really frustrating as the functionality ids there just not the automation which you’d expect given the relationship between the two programs.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

[Wilkie Branson] “using export frame to Photoshop works perfectly.. except for the fact that it requires you to export each frame manually which is obviously not a sensible option when you have 10s of thousands of frames to export”

Now this makes sense. I didn’t realize you wanted to export the entire Timeline.

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[Wilkie Branson]

hurrah! it works! roll back to cc2104 use ProEXR export with layer module – then into Photoshop with the ProEXR plugin – layers are there with the correct names from AE ready to run the action through a script. ! thank god for that, just saved a year of manually pressing “save frame as” thanks everyone