The section on Modifying Text is especially useful for day to day hacking.

1. Go to System Preferences on the Mac or Control Panel on Windows
2. Click on Quicktime
3. Click the Advanced Tab
4. Check Show Legacy Encoders 

Thanks Brandon

First of all, we create a Socket Object, and connect to our web feed. In this case we are looking for all photos tagged red referenced by this line

webConnect.write (' GET /services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=red HTTP/1.0\n\n');

We then fetch and parse the XML, and loop through looking for a link element with an enclosure attribute like so

for(entry in elements)
{

	if(elements[entry].localName() == “entry”)
	{
		var entryNodes = elements[entry].elements();
		for(x = 0; x < entryNodes.length(); x++){
				if(entryNodes[x].localName() == 'link')
				{
					if(entryNodes[x].@rel.toString() == "enclosure")
					{
						pictureArray.push(entryNodes[x].@href.toString());
					}
				}
		}

	}
}

Once we’ve gathered up an array of links, we download the photos using system.callSystem() and a command line app called curl. There is probably a Windows version of curl, but it probably won’t be installed on your machine which makes this a mostly Mac script. This code handles the download and import. Note, my version of Wordpress is really upset about using the keyword system in code listing, thus there is extra whitespace around the system.callSystem() call in the code listing below.

for(y =0; y < pictureArray.length; y++)
{

	var picNameSet = pictureArray[y].split("/");
	var picName = "/" +  picNameSet[picNameSet.length -1];

	var curlString  = "curl -O " + pictureArray[y];
	var retVal = sys  tem.callSyste  m(curlString);

	var fileToImport = new File(picName);
	var myProject = app.project;

	if(fileToImport.exists)
	{

			var my_io = new ImportOptions(fileToImport);

			if(my_io.canImportAs(ImportAsType.FOOTAGE)){
				try{
					myItem = myProject.importFile(my_io);

				}catch(e){
					alert('couldn\'t import flickr item with error: \r' + e.toString())
				}

			}
	}

}

I mentioned this code was slightly flawed. Network activities are by their nature asynchronous, our tasks go out into the ether and we don’t now when or how they return. In this case I start the download and quickly check to see if the file is available. If it’s not, I just skip it. In the real world of network activities this will never do. AE scripting by it’s nature is a pretty synchronous activity, we do one thing and then another. As I explore this style of scripting I’m investigating work arounds on how to mesh the two styles of programming a bit better. For now, I just ignore it. grin. If you’ve got ideas about smart ways to handle asynch network scripting in After Effects, I’d love to hear about it.

Anyway, I run the script and import 20 or so photos matching the tag red. In this case I’m just discarding all the metadata and context information that make the photos really interesting, but it’s a fun experiment and I get to see a bunch of cool photos. As I continue to explore, hopefully I’ll come up with more robust network programming and more concrete tools for using web feeds in an interesting way.

zip download of db_flickrExperiment

This code segment outlines the basics.

webConnect = new Socket;
response = new String;

if(webConnect.open("feeds.feedburner.com:80","UTF-8")) {

webConnect.write('GET /current/currentpicks?format=xml HTTP/1.0nn');

response    =  webConnect.read(100000);

response = response.toString();

var xmlStart = response.indexOf("<?xml");
var xmlString = response.substring(xmlStart, response.length);

alert(xmlString)

webConnect.close();

} else {

alert (""unable to open webConnect via Socket"")

}

We open a Socket and connect to, in this case, a feedburner feed. We use the read() method to read in the XML, and since the Socket object includes the header we use indexOf to find the beginning of the XML and substring to read to the end of the line.

A couple of gotchas in the code. In this case the header tells us the document encoding is utf-8 so we explicity set it with

webConnect.open("feeds.feedburner.com:80","UTF-8")

Also, when Matt and I were initially exploring this we were just getting the header. It looks like a GET request with

response    =  webConnect.read()

allows a block response, and the later content was going off into the ether, If we used

response    =  webConnect.read(100000);

with a sufficiently large number to include all of the XML we got all of the contents of the XML file. This seems like a really bad idea, since we’ll never know the size of the XML file unless we munge some headers and setting it arbitrarily high also seems like a bad idea. Can someone who’s spent more time with the Socket object leave a comment or email me on how to handle the block response or alternatives to setting a big count for the read() method? I’d appreciate it.

Anyway, that’s the basic idea. You’d then parse the xmlString variable and do fun stuff with it. One heads up, the sample above includes namespaces, so be sure to read the section on namespaces in the Scripting Guide.

This will definitely make things a lot easier to develop tools, and it opens up a whole new slew of possibilites for Web 2.0 mashup tools and explorations when combined with After Effects Socket or new HttpConnection support. kuler explorer anyone? If you’re a scripter, you owe it to yourself to check out the ExtendScript Toolkit (ESTK) 2.0 there are a lot of features that sort of “hide” in Extendscript that aren’t obvious in the After Effects CS3 scripting guide(pdf link).

More experimentation with sampleImage(). This one relies on this expression.

target = thisComp.layer("layerToSample.mov");
samples = new Array();

var spacing = 10;
var w = target.width / spacing ;
var layerOrder = 1;
var h = 10 * layerOrder;

letters = "   .,:!-+=;iot76x0s&8%#@$";

for(x= 0; x < w; x++){
	samples[x] = target.sampleImage([x* spacing ,h],[spacing , spacing], false, time);
}

var string = '';

for(z = 0; z < samples.length; z++){
	var y = Math.round((0.299 * samples[z][0] + 0.587 * samples[z][1] + 0.114* samples[z][2]) * 100)/ 4;
	string = string + letters.substring(y,y + 1);

}

We loop through the row of pixels and place the sampled RGB pixels in the samples array, convert the RGB samples to YUV and grab the Y or brightness value for comparison against a rough gradient of ASCII values. For best results, use a monospace font to retain proper spacing. A more complete script/expression and breakdown to come.

sampleImage() is a new layer method expression introduced in After Effects CS3 that allows you to access a layer’s color pixel data. Combined with sophisticated particle systems like Particular, I think we’re likely to see some really interesting designer driven explorations a la Processing, but with more of a tinkering, let’s try things out approach.

I’ll have more scripts, and automated stuff as I explore further, but until then you might want to take a look at the reference and examples that Dan Ebberts is posting at the brilliant MotionScript.com

This is the first fruit of my experimentation. I often need to make a tape log of a sequence in Final Cut Pro, and a quick way to get the sequence details into a text file could be useful. The most approachable way to address the problem seems to be with markers. You can store all of the values I need for a tape log in a marker - item number, name, description, length and the starting timecode. So, that’s how we’ll approach it.

1. First, we’ll need to add a marker at the time in the sequence we’d like to add an item. A quick way to add a marker is to hit the m key twice, or go to the menu item Mark:Markers:Add . When we do that we’ll get something that looks like

2. We’ll want to rinse and repeat for each item we want in the log.

3. Export an FCP-XML file of just the single sequence of interest. A possible upgrade for this action would be to do a version where we pick the sequence, but for now the Action is just set to work with a single sequence. Any version of the Final Cut XML spec should work just fine

4. Launch the workflow, markerToLogWorkflow.workflow which should look like this.

5. Run the workflow by pressing the run button. You can set options by selecting or deselecting the checkbox for items. When I run the workflow I get a text file looking something like…

That’s about it. Next up will probably be digging into Indesign Automator Actions so that we could flow our log into a nicely formatted document. Another interesting Action might be to do this in reverse adding Markers from a producers Excel, Word Doc, or XML File, but I’m happy with this as a start.

So, what do I think about Automator? It definitely takes a little getting used to, but if Apple continues to improve features, I’ve heard rumors of cool Leopard upgrades, then I think it will be a good application to add to the mix.

Zip Archive of Action and Workflow

You’ll need to move the markerToLog.action file to your Library/Automator folder for the Workflow to work.