Camera data export script

Published by Virgilio Vasconcelos on January 11th, 2008 in 3D News, Plugins, Python Scripts

The pipeline including a video compositing program like After Effects and a 3D app is quite common among motion design professionals. More than just rendering the 3D content and importing it into AE or Shake, its often needed to use the camera data to get correct tracking.

Sometime ago, when presenting Blender to a friend who works extensively with After Effects, one of the first questions he asked me was if one could smoothly get the camera data from Blender into AE. After some research on this subject, the results were not very pleasing: there was no painless way of doing it.

Well… seems that things have changed!

Andrew Rollo (a.k.a. osxrules) made a Python script that allow us to do export camera data to After Effects and Apple Shake using Maya ASCII format.

You can download it on the BlenderArtists.org thread. Be sure to check for updated versions (in the time of writing this, they are in this post).

Wondering if it works well? I'll quote a response made by an user known as dsp_418:

I've played with your script: actually, it rocks.
I'm not getting any kind of problem, and finally I can exchange data between Blender and After Effects. That's really important for my job (and I think for many other people around who use Blender and do compositing in a commercial environment).

Thanks, Andrew, for making this and Piero for the heads up!

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12 Responses to “Camera data export script”

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1 freakydude Jan 11th, 2008 at 9:06 am

That's pretty cool, Imagine using this in combination with the blenses script.
http://home.metrocast.net/%7Echipartist/BlensesSite/index.html
http://www.mindinsomnia.com/tutorials/image_2_3d/

Sweet stuff.
2 Martín Eschoyez Jan 11th, 2008 at 12:16 pm

Cool! I work a lot in AE, but i think that knowing the composite nodes & VSE i can replace it very well… i hope to have the time to switch this year…
3 Dread Knight Jan 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

osxrules not xD

Anyway, you did a great job! :)
4 rIO.sK Jan 11th, 2008 at 6:18 pm

That is a great news, but… it's me or the files (and the site) are gone offline ??
5 Colin Levy Jan 11th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

DUDE!! That's so awesome! I've needed a script like this for a long, long time…
6 KevinW Jan 11th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

YES!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOHOO!

–
Kevin
7 rdthjdrtj Jan 13th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

Awesome, now real world data can be used very good.

Would love to see this in Blender native.
8 Ian Hubert May 9th, 2008 at 9:59 pm

AH! Epic! Glroious! So awesome!

This shall be HIGHLY helpful. Andrew Rollo… you the man.
9 rupchar Jun 6th, 2008 at 5:57 pm

I am having trouble with this i am using after effects CS3 but when i import the camera i doesnt have the data attached with it :-( (upsetting!) it looks like it des but doesnt i even had the updated version but still know joy i also keep getting this message in the code box of blender every time i try this:

scene.getCurrentCamera deprecated!
use scene.objects.camera instead
scene.getChildren Depercated!
use scene.objects instead

i am a newbe so i dont know how to do any of the coding so i am in need of some help!!!

ANYBODY…?
10 sambre Jun 7th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Hi everyone,

First thanks for that script, i've been looking for it…

I need your help, I have a macbook pro running with Leopard and the latest version of Blender and I'm having trouble making it work (the script, of course). Can someone guide me trhough the installation of this script (on a mac)?

Thanks.
11 Eric Jun 8th, 2008 at 1:10 am

Reply to sambre

you need to use terminal to show hidden files first (i had the same problem yesterday)

open terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
then press enter
then type:
killall Finder
then press enter

then go through your computer and navigate to the blender application

then right click and click on show package contents

then go into contents, macos, .blender, and drop it into scripts folder

then go back into terminal and type the exact same set of lines except change TRUE to FLASE (this makes everything back to normal)

by the way I am having the same problem with the camera data not being there in after effects. It has all the null objects and the camera but no keyframes or anything, just no data attached to the objects or camera.

PLEASE HELP
12 Clas Jun 16th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

Thanks Eric!=)

Camera data export script

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