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labs: AEae (Multiple AE instances in OS X). . .

aeae

Just like my MayaMaya app, but for After Effects. It simply opens up another instance of After Effects so you can have multiple projects open at once.



Unfortunately you cannot copy and paste directly from instance to instance, but there are many other reasons this can prove to be very useful.

AEae_v1.1 now supports drag and drop! You can either launch the application normally and choose how many instances you would like to open, or you can drop project files on the app to automatically open them in different instances of After Effects. This version also includes preferences, if you would like to reset the preferences, delete the “com.andorulabs.AEae*” file located in your “/User/Library/Preferences” directory.


Download: AEae download page. . .

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24 Responses

  1. Todd Kopriva says:

    You can do this on either OS by starting After Effects from the command line with the -m switch.

    • Djordje says:

      Todd, thank you for this so much!

      Djordje

    • Ryan says:

      Sorry I must be dense – why is this app usefull. I would think it would just bog down your machine. Can someone give me the top 5 reasons why this app is the bomb diggidy?!

      • andrew says:

        It’s a valid question 🙂 I actually don’t use this very often with AE. But it is very useful for quick comparison purposes. You can easily import an AE project into your current project, it is just easier to compare or grab expressions/etc. Without having to clear out the imported project later. It would be nice if AE had a selective import so you could just get what you need. This is just something that has always been simple in apps like Nuke/etc. Just a simple workflow thing.

  2. andrew says:

    Yep, this app does it in one click and never even opens the command line. Since you work at Adobe, when can we expect to be able to copy/paste across multiple AE instances? ^_^

  3. […] is a quick demo of the AERender & AEae apps (both available in the “labs” section of this […]

  4. Been doing this for a while all you have to do is duplicate the application.

  5. […] con estas aplicaciones creadas por Andrew Hake lo tenemos más fácil. Se trata de Aeae y  Aerender. La primera de estas utilidades nos permite abrir varias instancias de After Effects a […]

  6. andrew says:

    Added CS3 version for those using AE CS3.

  7. Oh man! This is brilliant!

    • andrew says:

      The icons were more work than the apps 🙂 It is literally a line of code, but damn if it isn’t easier to click once instead of opening up another app and typing a line of code.

  8. WIll says:

    This is so Awesome!!! I really love this App.

    Thanks!

  9. jurgen says:

    does it not work in Tiger?

    • andrew says:

      I have not tried. If it doesn’t you should be able to edit it within Tiger’s AppleScript Editor, save it out as a new app, and then it should likely work ok.

  10. kike says:

    its great.. but its a shame it does only work on mac osx.. it would be great for pc 🙂

  11. Jeremy says:

    The CS3 version tries to launch CS4 inside the CS3 folder. The script should read:

    set aepath to the quoted form of (POSIX path of (“/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/Adobe After Effects CS3.app”))

  12. Mike says:

    Possibility of an updated script for CS5.5?

    • andrew says:

      Yeah the current version will actually work with CS5.5, you just need to delete the preference file that is stored at ~/Library/Preferences/com.andorulabs.aeae

      and reset the app location to CS5.5

  13. […] of my favorites are AEae (opens multiple instances of After Effects), AERender, difference, and projector (pairs nicely with […]

  14. کس ننه هاتون

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