Monthly Archive for January, 2010

When running Adobe After Effects under OSX, it is possible to attempt to force a crash recovery if the application become unresponsive. I’ve written a script to make the process a little more painless.

The Script


set procName to "Contents/MacOS/After Effects"
set grepCommand to "ps -ef | grep -i '" & procName & "' | grep -v grep | awk {'print $2'} | head -1"
set curPID to do shell script grepCommand
if curPID is not "" then
set killCommand to "kill -SEGV " & curPID
set result to do shell script killCommand
end if


Stand-Alone Version

You can export the above AppleScript as an application to keep in your Dock, or download a prebuilt version below:

AE Suicide 1.0

Credits

AE Suicide was written based on a technique outlined here:

Adobe After Effects CS4: Optimize the Pipeline

Thanks to Eric Bauer for first turning me on to this trick and Paulo Dias for help with testing and designing the icon.

AE Suicide was completed in Seattle, Washington on 2010-01-04.