In april 2009, more than 2 years ago, I posted a top ten list of After Effects scripts I was using often.

It was the most visited page of the site until yesturday, when it went offline to give room for the new blog. But that was just a temporary move, as I compiled a brand new 2011 list which will be outdated in less than 3 months from now. The beauty of the Internet even allows me to publish this new list on the old list url. Hooray for forward compatibility !

This list is based on my daily use of scripts, and in no way is a “best-of” list. A lot of very cool and huge scripts are not mentionned here simply because I don’t use them.

All of the scripts in the Top Ten are available on Lloyd Alvarez’s aescripts.com. It’s a great ressource for scripts (mine included). Other than having my scripts hosted there, and owing Lloyd a few beers for the help he provided me through all these years of scripting, I’m not involved in aescripts.com. That was for the mandatory disclaimer. Now, let’s have a deeper look at that list.

10 – 3D Extruder

3D Extruder is so convenient when you don’t have 3rd party plugs to create 3D / Extruded logos. It uses a well known hack workaround to give that fake look, but with it’s speed and ease of use, you finally get some extra time to fine tune your titles.

09 – Smart Baker

Sharing projects including Expressions can become really messy if you open After Effects in a different language than the one used to create them in the first place. To workaround this problem, AE have a neat option “Convert expressions to Keyframes”. Well this option is neat until you use it. It clutters your expressioned properties with keyframes on every frame, even if your expression is simple like “use value from this property”. That’s where Smart Baker comes handy. It will analyze your expressions and create the needed keyframes only.

08 – Stereo 3D Toolkit

Stereo 3D bubble may have burst because of greedy producers, you’ll probably have to work on Stereo projects for the years to come. AE isn’t really helping you that much, and finding the perfect workflow is kinda trial and errors. Stereo 3D toolkit helps easing the process. So sad it went out after I finished writing my book about Stereo in AE (Yes self promotion is lame, but as it’s written in french, the odds you’re gonna buy it are pretty low anyway. And I really wanted to include it, but it was really too late !).

07 – rd: Kinda Sorta

You know how it starts, you try to keep things clear in your comp, but as you go back and forth with your client, and this deadline way beyond your schedule, it gets so messy that you feel a bit lost. Well this happens to me sometimes, usualy on 3D comps with tons of layers. That’s where Kinda Sorta comes into play. It will sort for me all my layers (by z-pos, starting point, and so on…) and my comp will shine again.

06 – Comps from Spreadsheet

This script is so useful when it comes down to lowerthird and titles. Fill a spreadsheet, create a template project, open the script and watch the magic happens.

05 – Save Comp as Project

Ok, this is one I’ve developed, but still, one of the most usefull I’ve ever used. As the name implies, it saves the selected comps as new projects, and even reduce them on the fly.

04 – pt_ExpressEdit

I’m a big fan of Expressions, and even wrote a book about it. Paul’s scripts is a real time saver when dealing with large amounts of Expressions.

03 – Immigration

Working with file sequences is not handy in AE. Immigration turns it into the best experience you can expect. You can replace, reorder, browse faster than ever all your picture sequences and manage them like a breeze. Definitively a must have.

02 – Zorro: The layer Tagger

Zorro is such a smart idea that I wonder when the After Effects team will introduce it natively inside AE. Zorro uses the often left aside layer comments to fill them with tags you choose, and then allows you to easily hide / show / solo your layers based on their tags with a single mouse click.

01 – BG Renderer

Back in 2009, BG Renderer was on the top of this listt, and today it still shines as the most useful script in my workflow. Only now it’s bigger and better. While you can still easily render your comps in background as the name suggest, Lloyd added so much extra cool features that you’ll have to test it to believe it. You can have the script send you an iPhone notification, an SMS or a mail whenever the render completes. I told you you wouldn’t believe me.