A smarter way to add custom markers to comps and layers in After Effects. Adjust the color, add a comment, set a duration, and protect a range of keyframes from being time-stretched. You can download try TimeMarker for free at aescripts.com/timemarker.
I had way too much fun making this teaser video. The goal was simple, make something visually striking that can get an animator curious about what this tool does. Heavily influenced by the synthwave genre and outrun aesthtics, I really wanted to explore some new motion techniques and capture this retro vibe.
As an avid After Effects user myself, markers help me keep my projects readable and organized. Unfortunately, the standard way to customize markers is a tedious process, so I made TimeMarker to make it easier to customize them quickly and efficiently. As my second commercial After Effects script, I learned a lot during the development, testing, and public release. I had the pleasure of experienceing my first few bug reports. As a designer diving into development, it was a learning experience to now be responsible for bug-fixing issues that I hadn't accounted for. I had the opportunity to communicate directly with customers to help troubleshoot, and along with the learning came great satisfaction once the bugs were fixed!
One of the interesting challenges was designing a functioning colour picker. After Effects lets you change the colours of layers and markers, however there's only a limites set available and they can be customized in the preferences panel. It was a bit tricky coding the logic to access and read the user's preference file to populate the correct label colours. There were several layers what made this difficult. First I needed to locate the preference file on the user's system which is different depending on the operating system. Second, in order to be compatible with non-English operating systems, I needed to code logic that would find the correct file based on a slice of the filename. Finally, I had to read the preference file and convert the colour values into a readable hex values.
As mentioned above, accessing the colour values was challenging, but testing was fun and kinda nerve-racking at the same time. With only one computer available, I switched my OS language to Japanese and did my best to reproduce issues described by customers. The problem was, I didn't understand a word of what I was seeing. So I used Google Translate to make sense of it for me. It helped me confirm the problem in the code, and get to the root of the problem.
Add custom markers to the comp timeline or individual layers.
Add split markers to the comp or individual layers. Split markers act as a single marker with a specified duration.
Prevent keyframes from being time-stretched when the nested comp is time-stretched. This makes it easier to adjust intro & outro animations for different comp durations.
Conveniently add a timestamp watermark in milliseconds, seconds, or frames. Timestamps ca be helpful when providing specs to developers.
