After Effects as backend movie engine?

Question

I'm working right now on a project that could allow me to generate movies based on the user input. User will upload some samples (photos, movies) to the web app and web server should generate movie based on that input and some predefined movie compositions.

I know that there are plenty of libraries for ffmpeg that could let me connect movies, photos programmatically (for example https://github.com/schaermu/node-fluent-ffmpeg for node.js) , but I was wondering if it's possible to use Aftereffects for that purpose since I have some knowledge in that software. I imagine that there should be set of scripts in Aftereffects that could import user uploaded data, fire the movie renderer and save output to the given location.

Do you think this is achievable using Aftereffects? Or maybe someone had similar problem and solved that differently ?

Cheers!

Answer 1

Yes, this is definitely possible. There are existing scripts for rendering and uploading via FTP, and the possibilities are pretty much endless. The part that jumps out at me as needing clarification is "scripts in Aftereffects that could import user uploaded data". This suggests a need for a back-end that "looks for" or "waits for" elements to "appear" in a directory to kick off the ExtendScript script in AE. This is where it gets slightly dicey in that you have to devise a way to do this with a "daemon" in your preferred operating system using any number of languages -- python, Java, AppleScript, shell, batch, etc. The rest of it ("import user uploaded data, fire the movie renderer and save output to the given location") could be done in ExtendScript.

Answer 2

I have done the exactly same thing. I DO NOT suggest you use script to do it. I have made the same mistake. Script is fine for a small job, but when you try to use it on a web server and run constantly for days and days it's very unstable. You will be facing a lot of crashing. I would suggest you use sdk to do the job. It's much more difficult to use sdk than using script, but is more stable and much faster! When you try to create a web service app, you want it to be stable and fast, don't you?