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Updating After Effects Projects
The "New project" action in the After Effects export builds a new project file from scratch, ie it does a File/New within After Effects. You will be prompted to save any existing project by After Effects.
The "Add to project" action assumes you already have some non-SynthEyes project, to which you would like to add the SynthEyes export as a new comp. This option will do that.
Tip : When you do an Add to Project, there will be no question about Save/Don't Save/Cancel, because the existing project is not being destroyed. If you get that question, you exported with New project instead of Add to project, so you should cancel to avoid losing unsaved changes in the current project!
If you select "Add to comp," then the layers for the export will be added to an existing comp in the existing project: either the currently-active comp, or to the first comp if none are active. Usually you will want to "Add to project," however.
If the "Update existing export" action is selected, the script will modify the existing, already-open, After Effects project that you have already exported this exact same scene to. This is helpful when you already have worked on an After Effects scene, adding additional layers, etc, but have updated some of the tracking in SynthEyes and don't want to what you added in After Effects.
The update script will update:
camera and object paths
lens distortion information
tracker positions and orientations
plane positions and orientations
light positions
Any new trackers, planes, or lights will be added (though new trackers will always appear at the top of the layer stackup). The script will not add new shots or moving objects. Trackers, planes, or lights that have been deleted from SynthEyes will not be deleted from the After Effects scene.
When you update an existing scene, elements you have added within After Effects will not be updated in any fashion, since SynthEyes does not know about them. So it is desirable to keep the modified 3D scene as similar as possible to the original scene, so that elements don't have to be unnecessarily re-positioned.
To achieve that, you should be sure to configure a coordinate system setup within SynthEyes, so that the 3D scene will have the same, or as similar as possible, positioning, orientation, and scaling from one solve to another.
If you need to add a few trackers, you might want to make them zero-weighted- trackers (ZWTs), and they will not affect the existing camera solve and layer positioning at all.
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