[Walter Soyka]

Hi, John! Your intuition is correct. For your SETUP, you want that one big comp so you can work spatially across screens.

How you actually OUTPUT your work depends on the video engineering and playback system requirements. (And those ideally depend on the creative requirements.)

If your videos will only ever sync-roll, playback might actually prefer one file at the full 1536×1536 canvas size, or pre-positioned in a 4K raster.

If they do specifically want 4 separate files, you can speed up your renders by doing the screen crops with output modules instead of comps. With 4 output comps, you have 4 render queue items, and therefore you have to render 4 times. With 1 full-size working comp in the render queue, and 4 separate output modules attached to it and handling the crops, you get all 4 outputs from just 1 render.

Depending on the playback system, they may have specific frame rate and codec requirements, too.

TL;DR, you’re off to a great start, and I think you’ll have to talk with whoever’s responsible for playback to make sure you’ll output exactly what they’ll need.

[Walter Soyka]

Unfortunately, I don’t think the video linked above will help. It’s about importing CSVs as data sources into Ae, but there’s no way to get them to markers there.

This is totally doable with scripting, though. In fact, a quick search turns up this tool:
http://www.dispersiondesign.com/products/ae_scripts/import_markers/

I haven’t used it, so I can’t vouch for it, but it looks to be exactly what you need.

dispersiondesign.com

Import Markers - AE Scripts - Products - Dispersion

Import Markers - AE Scripts - Products - Dispersion

[Walter Soyka]

I can’t remember when Ae didn’t work like this, but you don’t normally run into this because of another special case — when you create a comp from a file, Ae drops the dot and file extension in the newly-created comp name. Maybe you’re seeing this if the assets are named such that they don’t have file extensions?

Anyway, here’s a quick script that will rename the selected comps in your project panel, based on the name of the first layer in each. It will also optionally strip a file extension (a dot and any number of alphabetical characters at the end of the name only).

app.beginUndoGroup("Rename selected comps with first layer name");
var stripDotExtension = true;
var projectSelection = app.project.selection;
var processedCompsCount = 0;
for (var i in projectSelection) {
    if (projectSelection[i] instanceof CompItem) {
        projectSelection[i].name = projectSelection[i].layer(1).name;
        if (stripDotExtension) {
            projectSelection[i].name = projectSelection[i].name.replace(/(\.[a-zA-Z]*$)/, "");
        }
        processedCompsCount++;
    }
}
writeLn("Processed " + processedCompsCount  + " comp" + (processedCompsCount != 1 ? "s" : "") + ".");
app.endUndoGroup();

[Walter Soyka]

Text layers, text properties, and text documents can be a little tricky. You can read all about it in the docs here:

https://ae-scripting.docsforadobe.dev/other/textdocument.html

In the meantime, try this for your script:

var compName = app.project.activeItem.name;
var textLayer = app.project.activeItem.layers.addText(compName);
var textProp = textLayer.property("Source Text");
var textDocument = textProp.value;
textDocument.resetCharStyle();
textDocument.fontSize = 30;
textDocument.fillColor = [1, 1, 1];
textDocument.applyFill = true;
textDocument.justification = ParagraphJustification.LEFT_JUSTIFY;
textProp.setValue(textDocument);
textLayer.property("Position").setValue([50, app.project.activeItem.height - 50]);
var dropShadow = textLayer.property("Effects").addProperty("ADBE Drop Shadow");
dropShadow.setProperty("Color", [0, 0, 0]);
dropShadow.setProperty("Opacity", 50);
dropShadow.setProperty("Blur Radius", 5);
app.project.activeItem.selectedLayers = [textLayer];

ae-scripting.docsforadobe.dev

TextDocument object — After Effects Scripting Guide 22.3.0 documentation

TextDocument object — After Effects Scripting Guide 22.3.0 documentation

[Walter Soyka]

Don’t ever use the numbers (i.e., 12212) directly; use the enumerated value name instead (CTScript.CT_ROMAN_SCRIPT). That way, if the numbers ever change from one version of Ae to the next, your script won’t break.

[Walter Soyka]

The numbers are enumerated values. (After Effects uses a lot of these.) Here’s some documentation:

https://ae-scripting.docsforadobe.dev/other/fontobject.html#fontobject-writingscripts

ae-scripting.docsforadobe.dev

Font object — After Effects Scripting Guide 22.3.0 documentation

Font object — After Effects Scripting Guide 22.3.0 documentation

[Walter Soyka]

This is a limitation of how effects are able to access other layers. Track mattes are not effects, and as you have noted, they behave differently.

As of Ae 2023, you can select which layer functions as the matte. (In previous versions of Ae, the matte layer had to be the layer above the layer to be matted.) This means that you can easily reuse track mattes, so I’ve replaced almost 100% of my Set Matte usage with the updated track matte feature.

[Walter Soyka]

Broadly speaking, you’ll want to first set up the effect you’re looking for. Maybe you want to use the Exposure effect, or masked solid with a blend mode, or something to create the lighting effect you want.

Then, you’ll want to experiment a little to understand the relationship between the brightness in the input image and the values they should drive in your effect.

Finally, you’ll use a sampleImage() expression to drive that value, based on the sampled pixels your first layer.

Here’s a sample from the incomparable Dan Ebberts, using the brightness of one layer (clouds, in his case) to affect the flare on another: https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/obscuration.html

If you can post a short sample video or even a few sample still frames, we could probably help more concretely.

motionscript.com

Dan Ebberts's Expressioneering Design Guide

Dan Ebberts's resource for After Effects scripting and expressions

[Walter Soyka]

It looks like there are hidden macOS metadata files in those folders — one hidden file per EXR file, that starts with a period. They’re showing up in the file browser dialog, and you’re accidentally trying to import them instead of the real EXR files.

In the Import window, scroll halfway down and make sure you’re importing the EXR files (the ones that DON’T start with a “.”) — then everything should work as you expect.

[Walter Soyka]

Tom’s right on — Ae’s shape layers and text layers are always continuously rasterized at the size of the comp. When you apply Solid Composite to a shape layer or a text layer, it will always fill the screen.