Rust Bindings for Adobe AfterEffects® & Premiere Pro® SDKs

High level bindings for the Adobe AfterEffects® (Ae) and Adobe Premiere Pro® SDKs.

This wraps many of the API suites in the Ae and Pr SDK and exposes them in safe Rust.

It also defines a set of macros that implement all the plugin boilerplate for you, so you can focus just on your actual plugin implementation.

Building the plugins is done entirely with Rust – there's no need to use any external programs or dependencies.

Packaging of the final plugin is done using a just script. Install with cargo install just and download AdobePlugin.just and put it next to your Cargo.toml.

Adobe plugins contain a special resource describing the plugin called PiPL. This repository includes a PiPL tool written in Rust which generates the needed resource in build.rs.

Pre-generated SDK bindings are included, so you can compile the final plugin by just running just release, and it works on both macOS and Windows.

You can also re-generate the bindings by downloading the SDK headers from Adobe and setting AESDK_ROOT and/or PRSDK_ROOT environment variables.

Using

Add after-effects or premiere to your dependencies and pipl to your dev-dependencies.

cargo add after-effects
cargo add --dev pipl

After Effects vs. Premiere

Adobe plugins are shared between After Effects and Premiere.

The main engine is based on After Effects, but Premiere loads most of the Ae plugins. While they have many common parts, there are some areas that are separated.

• Premiere is missing all AEGP suites.

• Premiere uses only software rendering, even if the Ae plugin supports GPU render and Smart Render.

• Premiere has a separate entry point for GPU rendering, which can be defined using the premiere::define_gpu_filter! macro.

• After Effects and Premiere also have some separate areas that are implemented independently.

• You can't write a video filter plugin using only the Premiere SDK, the base engine is using Ae SDK.

Getting Started

Examples

A few basic examples are included in the repository. For more advanced use cases, refer to the C/C++ examples from the SDK.

For a more advanced sample with full GPU rendering you can check out the Gyroflow plugin

Development

When developing your plugin it's best to use the debug build - it will catch and display panics for you and it will log any messages and stack traces to DbgView (on Windows) or Console (on macOS). This is done by running just build.

The release version can be built using just release

Some plugins may be slow in debug build, in this case you can add optimizations to the debug build by using

[profile.dev]
opt-level = 3

or add debug symbols to your release build by using

[profile.release]
debug = true
debug-assertions = true

in your Cargo.toml file.

The release build doesn't catch panics by default to not add any additional overhead. You can opt-in for the panic handler by enabling catch-panics cargo feature:

features = ["catch-panics"]

Help Wanted/To Do

• If you need a suite that's not yet wrapped, feel free to create a PR wrapping that suite.

• Examples and documentation.

• Better error handling. Possibly using color-eyre?

Using the Adobe SDK C++ Headers

Download the Adobe After Effects SDK.

⚠️ The SDK published by Adobe is outdated if you are using the 3D Artisan API to write your own 3D renderer plug-in. Also see Features below for more information.

Ignore this if you just want to develop 2D plugins (which still have access to 3D data).

Define the AESDK_ROOT environment variable that contains the path to your Ae SDK. Typically the directory structure will look like this:

AfterEffectsSDK
├── After_Effects_SDK_Guide.pdf
├── Examples
    ├── AEGP
    ├── Effect
    ├── ...

Features

• artisan-2-api – Use the 2nd generation Artisan 3D API. This is not included in the official Ae SDK. Specifically it requires:
  • AE_Scene3D_Private.h
  • PR_Feature.h Contact the Adobe Ae SDK team and ask nicely and they may send you theses headers.

Wrapped Suites

After Effects

Premiere

License

Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause OR MIT OR Zlib at your option.