Autosave

[miki]

"A feature in which the program automatically saves data files at predetermined intervals. This is an important feature because it reduces the amount of work you would lose if your system crashed. Usually, you can specify how often you want the application to save data."

I have lost hideous amounts of work because of AE crashing on me before I've remembered to save

Even a simple pop-up alert saying "It's been 1 hour since you last saved!" would be great.

(Why oh why didn't Adobe build this feature into the software? )

Miki

[Paul Tuersley]

To do this, the script would have to lurk in the background checking things at timed intervals and I'm pretty sure that isn't possible.

Paul T

[scribling]

Sure it's possible. I've seen it. Useful Assistance I think sells it. But couldn't you just make a script that has an indefinite loop and waits, say, 30 min before executing again?

[vidpat]

Unfortunately the problem is that there is no timer/interrupt facility exposed through scripting. Also, there isn't a threading model that could be used to implement a crude polling approach. Thus, entering in to a loop will block until termination. In the case of an infinite loop, AE will appear to hang. So while it is possible to write a polling loop that could check the elapsed time on each iteration and save the file at intervals, the user wouldn't be able to interact with AE and no changes could be made that would need to be saved.

Hopefully, Adobe will include a timer in AE7. Along similar lines, it would also be nice if scripts could run in their own thread and be killed with out killing AE.

[calier]

it is possible to write an autosave script using thw windows Task Scheduler ... i wrote one ..and it works (without interupting after, ex : RAM preview, tracking, ...)
It is a little complicated to setup... but it works.

Some of the issues are that after effects doesn't let you save the project "as a copy" meaning that if you want to make a backup copy you would have to save it twice (one time for the backup, one time to save it back on it's original location) and it would still overwrite your actual project.

A good solution was to notify people if they haven't saved since x minutes instead of just saving and overwriting the file ... but once again a problem occures when your trying to do this as the after effects "app.project.file.modified" method has a bug and always return the same last modified time 19:26:40 ... or something like that ...

[scribling]

On OSX I've written a crontab that simply makes the computer say, "Time to save your project." You can make this occurr as often as you want. I run it every hour. It actually works for me. I get so into working that I forget to save then all of a sudden a voice anounces, "Time to save your project," and it brings me back to reality and I hit save.

I would also recommend buying a Cepstral voice if you're going to use this. I bought Lawrence. I can't have Agnes screeching at me all day.

On Windows, I'm not sure if there's a cron events manager that'll do this.

For OSX use Cronnix. Super easy.