Useful Links

Over the summer I worked a lot on scripting and expressions. So I thought I would provide everyone with some of the links I found most useful.


This link is for scripting basics and the author gets into some cool aspects of sine and cosine.

This one goes more into expressions and when they are useful, and when not to use them. It also provides some basic expressions that can help you to understand what they do.

I would suggest practicing expressions earlier as they can save you a lot of time and headaches. Scripting is a bit more complicated and you will probably have to read through it a few times to fully grasp what's going on.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I love to use keyboard shortcuts because it makes the workflow so much faster. Unfortunately as far as I know AE does not have a built-in hotkey editor like Maya or other programs have.

But AE has a lot, a LOT of keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, except very useful things like RAM Preview to hear the audio! c'mon Adobe!. If you have a numeric keyboard you can simply press . (period) to preview the sound, but Mac laptops don't have a numeric keyboard.

However there is a free script that you can download (and run inside AE) that allows you to explore and even re-map all hotkeys (not that I suggest you do that!.

I added that link under Design Tools and Other Links on the right column of the blog because I think everyone should download and install that script. Simply unzip and move the folder inside the After Effects Scripts folder. To access the scripts (and any other script) go to File>Scripts and launch it form there. This particular one I am talking about is called KeyEd Up.

If anyone figures out how to create or re-map a hotkey to do a RAM Preview let me know! enjoy:-)