Valentin Klein
7c62272305
* #3099: placed .ai pages fill the size After Effects stored; null anchors default to the corner Footage of an .aep keeps the size After Effects stored for a placed PDF / Illustrator / EPS file (the ArtBox, rounded up), and masks and anchors are measured against it. The page was drawn as a PDF viewer frames it (CropBox, /Rotate) at its own size, scaled by the width ratio at full resolution and stretched to the stored aspect below 3/4: masks too large, art off centre, squeezed at half resolution. - effectcraft-pdf: Framing::Placed / parse_page_framed (ArtBox clipped to the CropBox, /Rotate ignored); boxes with a non-finite corner or span are not used - Footage::placed_page (set by the .aep importer, serialized only when true): the page is framed so and filled into the stored size (effectcraft_render::vector_fit), decoded, continuously rasterised and in Create Shapes from Vector Layer; Reload keeps the size; the frame cache keys it by size and framing - .aep import/export: a null's absent Anchor Point is [0, 0], as After Effects reads it - fixture ai-mask-3099.aep (own synthetic files, scrubbed, profiles stubbed) and tests against After Effects 2026's read-back * #3099: placed-page framing only for .ai and .pdf, EPS as before; doc comments After Effects' sizing was measured with PDFs named .ai only; an EPS from an .aep keeps its bounding box at its own size (listed as not measured in docs/gaps.md and docs/aep-import.md). Doc comments on the touched functions. * #3099: shapes from a placed page keep its frame (track matte) Create Shapes from Vector Layer converted every path of a placed page, so bleed, art past the artboard or the page's background showed where the footage's raster hides them. The layers it makes from a placed page now take a hidden "<layer> Frame" shape layer (the footage's width x height) as their Alpha track matte: drawn at the comp's resolution, its edge is the raster's on shape and image layers alike. The command returns the frame layer's id too.
effectcraft-aep
After Effects projects (.aep, .aepx) in one crate, the way effectcraft-lottie handles Lottie:
container: reads and writes the container as a lossless chunk tree, with a typed, read-only view (below; its API is re-exported at the crate root);import: maps the typed view into an EffectCraft project and reports everything it does not import (docs/aep-import.md);export: writes an EffectCraft project as an.aepwith every chunk built in code, and reports everything it does not export (docs/aep-export.md).
No file access: callers pass bytes, so the crate builds for wasm32.
Container
An .aep is a RIFX container (big-endian RIFF) with form type Egg!: chunks of a 4-byte id, a
big-endian u32 size and a body padded to an even length; LIST chunks start with a 4-byte list
type followed by chunks. parse builds the tree, write serialises it, and for every input that
parses, write(parse(x)) == x byte for byte (container and chunk sizes are recomputed from the
tree; pad bytes, odd bodies and the bytes after the container, an XMP packet, are kept).
The XML form of a project (.aepx) is read into the same tree by read_aepx (a small bounded
XML tokenizer, no dependency); parse_any picks the reader by content, so the typed view and the
importer take either form. The mapping is in docs/aep-format.md, section 1.
Bodies that look like lists but are not chunk sequences (for example LIST btdk, raw text) stay
opaque rather than failing the parse. Input is untrusted: sizes are checked against the remaining
input, nesting and chunk count are bounded (Limits), nothing is allocated from a declared size,
and truncated or damaged files return Err (or, inside the container, an opaque body).
The container layer decodes no chunk body. On top of it, a typed view (Project, Item, Comp, Layer,
Property, ...) reads the fields whose layout was verified against the values the test files were made
with: layer and composition headers (switches, exact times and time stretch, size, frame rate, work area, shutter phase, display start, renderer),
static transform values in After Effects' units with the "absent = default" rule, keyframe records
(interpolation sides, ease per component, plain and spatial templates), Time Remapping, expressions with their enable switch, effect
instances and parameter values, masks and bezier paths with tangents, shape layer groups, text documents
(paragraph and style runs, box, justification, tracking, faux styles, caps, leading), markers with
duration, strings and cue data, cameras and lights with their options, footage (stills, audio, image
sequences), solids and precomp links. Every accessor returns Option/an empty list on damaged data and never
panics. Which fields are verified, which are not decoded, and how it was found is in
docs/aep-format.md.
Specifications
Public specifications used for parts the format embeds:
- ICC.1:2010: the profile description of a working-space profile (a v2
descor a v4mluctag), from which the working space's name is read (container/settings.rs). - RFC 4648 (base64): the profile data in the project's colour settings JSON (read, and written by the exporter).
- The exporter's own colour profiles (
export/icc.rs): ICC.1:2010 version 4.3 display profiles with ITU-R BT.709 primaries, D65 white, a D50 PCS and a Bradford adaptation, the IEC 61966-2-1 sRGB curve or a 2.4 power curve; the profile ID is the MD5 of RFC 1321.
Clean room
Everything here comes from our own observations: project files that we generated ourselves with
After Effects, one change per file, compared byte by byte. No source code or format
documentation of another .aep reader or writer was used, and no Adobe asset is used. The test fixtures are such generated files
(own test data): a few combined projects, one composition per case (tests/fixtures/CASES.md;
the generator is in tests/fixtures/tools/). They are not in this repository but in
storytold/effectcraft-corpus, with their
attribution, the generation notes and the inspection of their embedded content.
cargo xtask aep-corpus fetches them at the commit pinned in tests/fixtures/corpus.lock, checks
every file against the SHA-256 listed there and only then installs them in corpus/aep (ignored by
git). The tests read them from the folder named by the EFFECTCRAFT_AEP_FIXTURES environment
variable (opt-in; set EFFECTCRAFT_AEP_FIXTURES_REQUIRED=1 too, so that a missing project fails). The
tests reach them only through tests/it/common/mod.rs, which hands a test its case as a project
of its own cut from the combined file; a test whose fixture is missing (or with the variable not
set) prints SKIPPED: fixture <name> missing and passes.
tests/fixtures/synthetic.aep (115 KB) is one of the two projects in the repository: made in After Effects 2026
with the working space set to None (one composition, an image sequence of three 8x8 PNGs, a
solid, a folder, a Levels and a Glow effect with expressions). Every After Effects project embeds
the working space's ICC profile (HP sRGB IEC61966-2.1 for the default) in a JSON settings chunk;
the one Utf8 chunk of this file that held a profile was replaced by {}, and nothing else was
changed. The tests in tests/it/import/synthetic.rs damage copies of it and need no other file.
tests/fixtures/ai-mask-3099.aep (131 KB, #3099) is the second: four hand-written one-page PDFs
named .ai with distinct page boxes, placed in a composition, one of them with two masks under a
Null parented to a Null (generated by tests/fixtures/tools/ai-mask-3099.py and
ai-mask-3099.jsx, scrubbed with scrub.py and stubicc). tests/it/import/ai_mask.rs checks
the import against After Effects' read-back, and the host's vector_import tests render it.
Tools
tests/fixtures/tools/: the generator of the test projects (regenerates the corpus with After Effects; its README says how).examples/aepdump.rs: prints the chunk tree of a file (ids, sizes, short data, match names):cargo run -p effectcraft-aep --example aepdump -- file.aep.examples/stubicc.rs: replaces every embedded ICC profile of a saved project by a stub that keeps only the profile's description: the JSONcolorProfileDataof the working space (any white space around the colon,\/escapes, quotes as") in an.aepchunk or the.aepxtext, and a raw profile of an imported image (an.aepchunk, or thebdatahex of an.aepx):cargo run -p effectcraft-aep --example stubicc -- in.aep out.aep. A profile it cannot replace stops it before anything is written. The importer reads the working space's name from the description only, so the project imports the same; no vendor colour data stays in the test project. Check the result independently, not by the tool's count (the corpus repository hastools/aep/inspect-embedded.py, which scans the raw bytes, base64 and hex).