brushes.paints.stencils.

the story
after months of anticipation and on-going and rewarding conversations with the incredible john nack from adobe about improving the communication between after effects and flash, i finally had the honor of meeting the after effects engineers in a break-out room at flash forward in seattle. as you may have read in my previous posts, i had worked out this crazy, multi-stepped approach to getting keyframe data from after effects into flash. it went something like this: AE -> clipboard -> excel -> access -> xml -> flash. LOL. that pretty much sums up my determination, in general, to achieve these crazy ideas that run around in my mind and soooo desperately need to come to life. so obviously this approach needed to be streamlined. with the release of AE 7.0, AMX export has now disappeared, so i was a bit concerned about improving the process.

during the break out session, john introduced me to the AE team, which at my table included micheal coleman, christopher prosser and the friendly james acquavella. after describing the need to port keyframe data easily from AE -> XML -> flash, chris enlightened me about the strength of jsx scripts. after the script was created, i wrote a component to handle the importing/parsing/mapping of the AE data to properties in flash. what follows is the end-result of that process:

After Effects 2 Flash: Transform Properties®
Have you ever wanted to port the Transform keyframe effects you created in Adobe After Effects® to Adobe Flash® without having to render out FLVs/MOVs that had a small screen size, large file size and questionable quality due to compression?

After Effects 2 Flash: Transform Properties is a Flash Extension that allows you to easily map keyframe data from the After Effects Transform Properties (Anchor Point, Position, Scale, Rotation and Opacity) to the properties (x- & y-position, _xscale & _yscale and alpha) of a MovieClip(s), as well as adjusting the registration point of the MovieClip based on the Anchor Point from AE.

[Back by popular demand – it’s available here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Experiments, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.