[Walter Soyka]

[Kevin Han] “How much performance am I losing by having a setup where I’m running everyone on 1, RAID 0 drive using 2 M.2 SSD’s?”

It’s almost certainly negligible (unless you are doing very little computation with a whole lot of footage involved).

You can watch a performance monitor to see if the disk utilization runs extremely high or the I/O queue gets long — either would indicate a disk bottleneck.

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

[Dave LaRonde] “I’ll guess that the photos should all have the same dimensions, too…”

If the source photos do have different dimensions that should be retained, you can use Collapse Transformations on the PHOTOS comp layers without issue.

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

[Walter Soyka]

This script should do the trick:
https://aescripts.com/marker-batch-editor/

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

[Walter Soyka]

My recommendation for this scenario involves a little bit of work upfront, but make updates super-fast later on.

Create a PHOTOS comp. Import all your photos into this comp. Select all layers, set their duration to a single frame, then use the “Sequence Layers” keyframe assistant to make it a single sequence of images.

In each of your placeholder precomps, place the PHOTO layer, enable time-remapping, and set it to a specific frame: 0 for the first image, 1 for the second image, 2 for the third image, and so-on.

Once you’ve done that, if you want to update the photos, you just have to clear out the old photos, import the new ones, and re-sequence them.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Sure. This will work on any English-language After Effects installation:

app.executeCommand(app.findMenuCommandId("Look at Selected Layers"));

And this should work on any language (command IDs seem to be constant across versions, though it’s certainly possible that they could change):

app.executeCommand(2834);

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

[Walter Soyka]

pt_OpenSesame was THE way to handle downsaves before Ae added the feature natively (sometime around CS6 IIRC). It’s also still a great way to make all kinds of project changes with a spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it would help too much here, as you’d still have to have the newer version in order to open the original AEP.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry, Darren, I’m not aware of any tool that does this for Ae. The AEP project file format is very different than the PRPROJ file format, and I don’t think there’s a clean way to do what the downgrader does.

If you have a one-off AEP that you need saved down a version or two, I’d be happy to help out.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Check out the “Responsive Design – Time” feature:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/responsive-design.html

It allows you to create intro and outro sections of a comp, and to protect regions from subsequent time-stretching (either in Ae or Pr).

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

[Walter Soyka]

Thanks, Xavier, and happy holidays to you, too!

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

[Walter Soyka]

I think your hotkey combination conflicts with the shortcut for the Add/Delete Scale Keyframe command. You may need to reassign the conflict or pick a different shortcut for the Scale dialog if the conflict cannot be cleared.

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