October 02nd 2015 08:00:44am

Welcome to Free Function Friday, a new series that dives further into the Adobe After Effects scripting language, ExtendScript. Each Friday morning, I will be releasing a new video tutorial explaining a different custom function that I’ve built and used in my own scripts over the years. I will also show a few examples along the way of how to combine and implement some of these functions into your own scripts to hopefully make your script coding easier.

Free Function Friday is a spin-off of my original scripting video tutorial series from 2013, which can be found here: After Effects ExtendScript Training. If you are new to After Effects script writing or Javascript, I would highly recommend that you begin there first for a fairly comprehensive explanation. It has over fourteen hours worth of video content, and can be a very helpful resource before taking on the use of the functions we will build in this series.

Before we begin the first episode I would like to invite you to watch the introductory video overview above about ExtendScript functions. It will give you a base understanding of what they are, how important they can be in your scripts, and how they can be implemented into your scripts. It’s important to understand how these can be used, because if a function is implemented improperly, they can effect other scripts that are running in After Effects. This can cause odd behavior in After Effects sometimes, and be difficult to track down the cause of the issue. Once you are familiar with the general rules it’ll be easier to make full use of a script function.