Universal Expression Language in After Effects Projects

Hey guys,

Just wanted to let everyone know that I just posted a little article on Notes. Within the article I touch on a common problem we’ve seen since the day we started selling AE Project Files. Often times a buyer in a different country will open one of our projects, and since the expressions we’re written in English, they throw errors, and don’t function properly.

In the past the only option was to change their After Effects language setting to English, which was less than ideal, especially for people that have no experience with the English language. Lloyd Alvarez recently released a script for After Effects that quickly universalizes the expressions to make them compatible with ALL languages.

At this point in time, we’re suggesting that all of you use this script for all of your projects that make use of expressions. But in the near future, there’s a GOOD chance that this will be a requirement. The script is currently on their “name your own price” model. Which means it can be obtained cheaply, making it easier to require it. But show the AEScripts community, and Lloyd some love. If the tool means you’re able to better support your buyers, which in turn leads to a better author presence here, pay something for the script.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here.

Compulsory might be rather difficult, both for author and reviewer. Lloyd’s script is excellent and will handle most scenarios (I’d thoroughly recommend it), but actually it’s impossible to write a Univeralizer for absolutely every expression eventuality without writing a full expression language parser…. which would be nuts.

In other words, every author would need to be able to check their work in another language version. That’s fine for those who have a non-english After Effects. It’s relatively easy to switch, but I’ve had problems (and known other people who have had problems) with switching an english AE to any other language. You often need to re-register the software. That means that you’d technically need to own two copies to check your work.

I’ve recently converted several of my projects to universal, including some which are extremely expression heavy. I think Meridian has several thousand lines of code. It took about half a day to convert and needed to be done by hand with a search and replace script.

You can actually write universal expression code relatively easily too. I’m thinking of doing a little tutorial about how to in the near future.

But anyway… the upshot is that I would have universality as a recommendation rather than an obligation, otherwise you put a glass ceiling on what users can do with expressions.

Perhaps there could be a “universal” tag when uploading.

And yes… make a little donation in the “name your own price”. You wouldn’t believe how much work goes into these things.

-f.

Thanks for pointing out the bad link Dorde, I’ve fixed it.

And Felt, good notes. I didn’t realize that the script didn’t cover the full gamut. Well maybe it will remain as just of a recommendation then. Either way I think it would be best if most authors did this for most of their projects.

Great idea Flash. Maybe a double badge (a bit like the sheriffs badge for copyright protection). One is that the author has some universal projects, the other is that the author has only universal projects. The badge would be automatically updated (once a week or so) by looking at the “universal” marker on the user’s project files.

This would be a great incentive for authors to update their back catalogue. It would also mean that non-english AE buyers could filter search results and even authors down to those that are universal. This would potentially open Videohive wide to the vast non-english speaking market. Do we have to record our user guides in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese and Korean too now?

On that note, a word of warning: This regards sinking prices, rising quality and rising input expectation from authors. A project file seems to get about the same price ticket regardless of how expression heavy / universal / customizable it is. The rationale being that it makes this file more desirable to buyers and will therefore get more sales. But this doesn’t work.

There is a danger that Videohive is rewarding authors for having a lower skill level, in that simpler projects seem to have prices that are much higher proportional to the effort involved than those that are complex (and I mean complex in a good way… lots of stuff under the hood that makes the user experience better). Example: some Trapcodey preset logo revealer – $12. Extremely in depth customizable video presentation $25. Price 2x, workload 10x.

Amid all the newcomers and all the great projects that are coming in recently (and the quality bar has gone through the roof for the top 5% or so of files), it’s easy to lose sight of how many quality authors are simply disappearing… or not producing files at anything like the rate that they used to. This is a simple factor of the pricing and mechanics of the Videohive site. I know there’s a lot of top authors who get pretty fed up with it.

-f.

Hi Chaps,

So here’s a couple of little tuts I put together.

The first one shows how to use Lloyd’s script. It then shows a couple of little situations that the script can’t handle… (1. as Lloyd mentions above, a custom named non-expression effect and 2. a reference to an effect inside a while loop) And finally there’s a bit about how to write universal code … which will allow you to go in and finish off any bits that the Universalizer can’t get for you.

http://vimeo.com/19485387 (23 mins)

The second tut is the same as the last part of the first tut. It just goes into a little bit more depth about writing universal code from scratch and demonstrates how to make a text layer that reveals how to refer to any property by index.

http://vimeo.com/19484488 (13 mins)

Hope that helps and gives an idea of what’s involved in going universal.

-f.