omino pixel blog

Update: Dear Adobe — please acquire and incorporate ObviousFX’s Copy Image plugin as part of After Effects proper.

The plugin, available for Mac and Windows, adds an Edit menu item, Copy Image, which copies the current composition image to the clipboard.

Thanks, ObviousFX and thanks, Rich, for pointing it out for me. Great stuff.

Original post:

Hopefully, someone will point out that this is already in After Effects CS4. But I’m such a luddite that I haven’t upgraded or even played with AE CS4 yet.

Sometimes, I use After Effects as a really powerful drawing program, no animation. It works in a very… engineer-friendly way, for compositing. I like that I can concoct a tree of layers, and modifiers on those layers, and use expressions to “rig” them together.

Here’s my feature request:

Copy Frame, High Quality

It’s pretty simple. It would place the current frame of the current comp at either full resolution, or maybe current resolution, as a PNG with transparency(or whatever is appropriate, here in 2009), onto the clipboard, ready to be pasted into another drawing app (or an email or whatever).

I realize with modern graphics displays and screen grabs you can get pretty good pastes… but you’ll have to crop carefully, maybe rearrange the workspace to get it visible, &c. And there’s render-to-file, but what a bother.

So I’d like Copy Current Frame as a feature, please. Thanks!