Projects and objects

When you use After Effects, you create projects, compositions, and Render Queue items along with all of the elements that they contain: footage, images, solids, layers, masks, effects, and keyframes. Each of these items is an object.

The heart of a scriptable application is the object model. In After Effects, the object model is comprised of projects, items, compositions, layers, and Render Queue items. Each object has its own special attributes, and every object in an After Effects project has its own identity (although not all are accessible to scripting).

You should be familiar with the After Effects object model in order to create scripts. More resources for learning about how to script are included in the final section of this chapter.