Description

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 from AEScripts.com for a suggested price of $10 (though less is great, too).

AE Suicide at AEScripts

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