I am pretty new to After Effects scripting and I'm fairly new to the programming world (1+ years experience).
My question has multiple possible answers I guess, I'm looking for a way to have After Effects save its .aep file into a very specific predetermined location. The reason I need this is because I'm currently in the process of writing scripts and tools to integrate After Effects and the rest of the Adobe products into our pipeline, so here's the general idea below:
The supervisor sets up a project / sequence / shot folder structure using tools built into the pipeline
The supervisor marks specific shots that will be done in After Effects (or perhaps an entire sequence or project)
The artist now comes in to work on their shot, they set their environment in the pipeline and the pipeline launches After Effects
The pipeline:
- Creates AE file with a specific name and save location (maybe creates and automatically saves the file into the save location for the first time? Or perhaps it just opens a new folder and tells AE where to put it)
- Creates compositions in the AE file that correspond directly to the shots being worked on
- Imports footage / sequences (etc...), that the artist is subscribed to
- Builds the render queue with the compositions it created
- Sets the render locations for all of the compositions
The artist now gets to work doing their magic
The artist hits save (cmd+s, ctrl+s, etc...), After Effects saves the project file into the predetermined location under the predetermined name.
The above will only occur on the first time the artist goes to work on the shot.
Now in this setup I will either need scripts to tell After Effects what the name of the new file is going to be and where to save it, or perhaps I need to have the script generate a new AE file and place it in the proper location. The other idea I had was to just create a blank After Effects file and have the scripts copy that file into the location it needs to go and rename it (this option is an avoid at all costs).
So my question is: is this possible? Is it possible to have Extendscript directly create a blank AE file and save it into a specific location without user interaction? Or perhaps simply tell AE where it is going to save the currently open file and what the file's name is going to be? The idea is more or less that the artist shouldn't be worried about the file structure or where things are going to go, the pipeline is going to handle all of that.
Ideally I need this working on After Effects CS5 and greater, but CS6 and greater is fine too, we are pretty much moving to CS6 anyway. Also, presently this needs to work on Mac computers, we have OSX 10.6.8 on most of the machines but we are going to be moving to 10.8 any day now, so preferrably it has backwards compatibility with 10.6.8 but not essential.