After Effects 2020 support

[andylewisart]

Hello,
I hate to make a thread like this, but if it helps even a little bit I figure it’s worth it! After Effects 2020 has much, much better EXR support - making it a must-upgrade for VFX artists. It would be great to get Deadline compatible with this soon! Thanks for all the hard work and good luck!

[Bobo]

Since Deadline only communicates with AE via the command line, it is rather trivial to add support for 2020 yourself. I just did, it took about 15 minutes, and I tested a simple comp to prove it works…

• Navigate to your Repository

• Locate the folder \plugins\AfterEffects\

• Open the file AfterEffects.param for editing and duplicate the [RenderExecutable16_0] section. Edit it to look like this:

  [RenderExecutable17_0]
  Type=multilinemultifilename
  Label=After Effects CC 2020 Render Executable
  Category=Render Executables
  CategoryOrder=0
  Index=10
  Default=C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2020\Support Files\aerender.exe;/Applications/Adobe After Effects 2020/aerender
  Description=The path to the After Effects CC 2020 executable file used for rendering. Enter alternative paths on separate lines.

• If you use the Monitor’s AE Submitter, you can also edit the file under \scripts\Submission\AfterEffectsSubmission.py

• Add a line ("CC2020", 17.0) to the dictionary AFTER_EFFECTS_VERSIONS = OrderedDict([ and save the file.

• If you like using the integrated submitter, manually copy the script file \submission\AfterEffects\Client\DeadlineAfterEffectsClient.jsx to the folder C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2020\Support Files\Scripts\ or the Mac equivalent. This is because the installer that ships with Deadline does not contain AE 2020 as a target yet.

That’s all!

NOTE that the installation path of AE 2019 contained the token “CC”, while 2020 omits that. On Windows, the path is now C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2020\, while 2019 used C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC 2019\

[andylewisart]

I am more than happy to go this route! Thank you for the tutorial, Bobo!

[Artists_In_Motion1]

Well, three updates later and we still need to follow these instructions as is seems AWS Thinkbox is unable to fix the typo in their code. Apparently delecting " CC" can’t be done even thought it was brought to their attention when they first “added” support for 2020.

So you now only need to install the latest update, go to your favourite txt editor and search through AfterEffects.param looking for “Adobe After Effects CC 2020” and take out the CC.

Guess we can call this progress… it’s only March 2020 (4 months) - hopefully it will be fixed in Deadline 11.