Communicating After Effects®
PatchMaker was originally intended to work in conjunction with Adobe® After Effects®. Therefore, it supplies advanced means of exchanging data with AE which will be discussed in this chapter.
Importing footage from AE
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PatchMaker |
After Effects® |
Suppose you start working with a new scene in AE, and there you import your footage. Then a need arises to make some tracking. To not repeat the same importing operations twice in PatchMaker, you can simply select a footage or a layer in AE and transfer it to PatchMaker.
Exporting motion to AE
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After Effects® |
After you have processed the footage and determined the motion, you can, with a single command, transfer its parameters back to AE for further processing. Besides sending the transformations, you can export the entire project, thus creating an AE composition from the underlay and the overlay to which the transformations are applied.
There are three ways of exporting data from PatchMaker:
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Direct connection between AE and PatchMaker instances.
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Saving a PatchMaker project file and importing it to AE.
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Using the AE ASCII transformation file format to store data in the clipboard or in a file. Note that this way to exchange data is valid even if the AE plugin is not integrated.
The table below describe data types and means by which they can be transferred.
| Data type | Direct communication |
Project file |
Clipboard |
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| Transformations only |  |
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| Entire composition | |
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