I am really having a hard time looking for information about how to use the scripting language (called extendedscript but it its javascript) in Adobe After Effects.
I find pages like this ones:
But they lack examples of very simple things. Especially the scripting guide! What I'd like to know is how to find a way to detect the proper "naming" of properties to know how to assing them.
I. E. I would like to create a key frame without blur on a text layer in second 5, and with blur in second 10. It looks like something simple... it should be like this:
var myProject = app.project;
var myComposition = myProject.activeItem;
var myTextLayer = myComposition.layers.addText("new_text_layer");
myTextLayer.addProperty("blur").setValueAtTime(5, 0);
myTextLayer.addProperty("blur").setValueAtTime(10, 60);
However, I cannot find the proper literal name to add effects, I don't know how to add property "blur" cause I don't know the word the scripting language uses for "blurring"!!! That's the same for almost everything.
So... How can I find out how to programatically set properties to layers on After Effects?
Thank you.
Effects are properties of layers and can be accessed as specified here. To access an effect you need to know the effect's name. You can then use
var effect1 = app.project.item(1).layer(1).effect("effect name")("effect param name");
Since there is no limit on how many effects are available for AE (e.g. there are at least half a dozen blur effects, but no effect called just "blur"), the individual effects are not built-in to the extendscript language, so you need to know how to specify each one. The Extendscript Toolkit's data browser is useful for this, because you can have a live instance of AE going and look through the data structures.
Another useful tool is the redefinery's rd:scripts package. It contains 51 really useful scripts for developers and it's free. One in particular is the gimme prop path script that will tell you the full path for a selected property.