Extendscript: Add Pseudo Effect

[Alex Printz]

I’ve used the pseudo effect maker plugin before with great success.

https://aescripts.com/pseudo-effect-maker/

Alex Printz
Mograph Designer

[Simon Heimbuchner]

Hey Alex, thanks for your response!
I’ve actually used that plugin before – either I’m missing something or I didn’t phrase my request correctly, sorry.
Is there a way to create a Pseudo Effect from within a script, like you would add an effect? like: mySolid.property("Effects").addProperty("ADBE Slider Control")

[Dan Ebberts]

For a script to be able to add a pseudo effect with addProperty(), the effect needs to be defined in the PresetEffects.xml file. Your script could check that file to see if it’s in there, add the XML code if it isn’t, save the file, restart AE, then add the effect (of course you’d probably have to save a temporary copy of the current project so you could restore the context after restarting AE). Quite a pain actually.

I generally do all that by hand on my system, add the effect to a layer, and save the effect as a preset. Then my script can just add the preset to a layer without the pseudo effect having to exist in the local PresetEffects.xml file. Much easier.

Dan

[Simon Heimbuchner]

Hey Dan,

Thanks a lot for your clear and detailed response.
That actually is quite a lot of pain, wow. Sounds like a few frustrating hours of work.
I guess I’ll just have to work without fancy Pseudo Effects then.

Simon

[Santi Agustí]

I think you will love this splendid piece of code by Tomas Sinkunas.
You need to save your pseudo as .ffx , then convert it to binary and follow this approach:
https://bitbucket.org/snippets/rendertom/qj5M4/apply-pseudo-effect-as-animation-preset

[Simon Heimbuchner]

Wow, this is amazing! What a cool piece of code. Thanks a lot for bringing this up, works great for me.

[Simon Heimbuchner]

Hey, me again – I’ve been out of town and only got around to test the code snippet as provided.
Now, trying to include my own ffx, I failed with converting ffx to binary.
Any help with that? Extendscript’s Convert to Binary doesn’t seem to help, and the only alternative I’ve stumbled upon is this script (https://aescripts.com/file-to-binary-converter/) for sale at aescripts. Seems a bit of stretch for a seemingly simple problem.

Thanks again for your help.

[Simon Heimbuchner]

Just for anyone reading this post – I did end up buying the script.

Motion Designer
Website: https://simonheimbuchner.de/

[Tomas Sinkunas]

Hey Simon. Sorry for a late reply, but I also have a snippet to convert files to binary strings as well. Check it out:
Convert to Binary

[Lenny Mason]

Hi, I’ve used your script to convert my pseudo to binary and I’ve used Santi Agustí’s link to apply it to that code, but when I try to run it, I get an error saying: ‘null is not an object’. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, I’ve only changed the presetBinary…