Useful Assistants

Award of Excellence Useful Assistants 1.2 received an Award of Excellence (4.5 of 5 diamonds) from DV Magazine.

Automate tasks in Adobe® After Effects®. Turn #$!5&^, *(&^%!# into click, click.

Profound Effects, Inc. is pleased to announce Useful Assistants™ (UA), a powerful automation tool for Adobe® After Effects® 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5. UA streamlines workflow within After Effects by automating tedious tasks and by adding convenience features that are absent in After Effects itself. Shipping with 118 assistants and currently 33 additional assistants available for free download from the Useful Assistants community site (Profound eXchange), UA makes many tasks as simple as a mouse click.

Note: Version 1.7 is a paid upgrade, and requires a new serial number. Existing users can upgrade to v1.7 from our online store.

For example, UA includes assistants that do the following:

What's New in Version 1.7 15 new and 6 updated assistants, for a total of 118 assistants View bundled assistants Read the Release Notes

• Saves your work to an incrementing file name automatically. Never lose your work!
• Automatically extend layers and nested compositions when a few more seconds are needed.
• Copy and paste whole groups of expressions at a time.
• Place markers wherever cuts or gaps are detected, automatically.
• Open, close, join, and reverse the direction of masks.
• Associate mask vertices with motion tracker track points.
• Create keyframes based on the luminance or channel information in the image.
• Sequence and fade layers in powerful ways.
• Paste, move, and snap layers in different ways.
• Make a contact sheet of frames from throughout a composition, automatically.

Here are demonstrations of some of the assistants that come with UA.

Take a tour of the Useful Assistants interface.

Here’s an example of the Create Footage Gallery assistant (available on the Profound eXchange), which creates a Web-based contact sheet of all or the used footage in a project.