Expression Controls

[Levi Borland]

Unfortunately you can’t do this with expressions. It is something that would have to be developed as a plugin with a CEP Panel or an HTML panel. However if you want to tidy up your expression controls then head over to AE Scripts and check out PseudoEffect Maker for After Effects. Promise you won’t regret it.

[Martin Falconer]

Thanks Levi, that looks like a nice way to organise expressions. As this is a template project, do you know if everybody who uses the template going forward would need to install the pseudo effects plugin in order to use it as well? The template will also be going to Premiere editors

[Levi Borland]

Hey Martin. Pseudo Effect Maker doesn’t require you to provide an AE FFX file to the end user, or require the use of Pseudo Effect maker plugin by the user in order to make use of the template. You take the time to build out the Pseudo Effect, and can export and save the FFX file, which can be installed in the AE Presets Install folder where After Effects is installed. But this isn’t necessary. With the old version there would be a missing effect warning in the Effect Panel but this isn’t an issue anymore.

I recently used this product to package together a 3D Stock Footage product called STOCK3D Fire Blast. There is an image of my FFX layout on the homepage that explains the product, which was built with Pseudo Effect Maker. Here is the link if you want to see what I mean. http://www.stock3d.net/

Essentially all the Pseudo Effect Maker plugin is doing, is allowing you to create a custom FFX where you can better organize the effects used in your template project. You can rename them, add them into groups with drop down toggles, ext. You are only repackaging, renaming, and creating a GUI of sorts to simplify the use of your template. It writes the FFX file for you automatically in XML and HTML syntax. This is SO extremely useful because if a layer or control layer has 30 or so effects or expression controllers on it, there isn’t a way built into AE to organize them together or rename everything to your liking. Without it that layer would just have 30 effects stacked one on top of the next. Makes it so difficult for the end user to navigate the template when they have to scroll down all the time on the effects panel. To fix this you would either have to code the FFX file yourself, or use a product like Pseudo Effect Maker. It’s essentially a script that gives you drag and drop building abilities, that then obfuscates everything into code on the backend for you. It really is quite impressive.

As far as porting everything into Premiere pro, check out the Essential Graphics Panel in After Effects. It allows you to add controls and package the template together into a Motion Graphics Template for Premiere. The user would be able to control the values inside premiere on their timeline, and AE runs in the background to sort out the changes. Very similar to Dynamic Linking. There is a huge limitation to the controls you are able to port over into premiere however, so do some research on the types of controllers that would actually work thus far with a MOGRT template. Adobe really needs to spend some time adding in more functionality there, but it is great in the mean time for simple Template projects.

Any other questions, give me a ring.

Best of Luck!