Hyle — A templating language with a custom-built compiler for After Effects

Hyle has a special place in my heart. It's my first big coding project on which I spent a lot of time and energy. I've learned a lot about programming, design, and the After Effects API with this project.

It started as simple After Effects script, and slowly morphed into a full-fledged templating language based on YAML with a custom-built parser and compiler for After Effects.

The idea was that scripting in After Effects was too complex and verbose. I wanted to create a language that was simple, declarative, and easy to learn for most motion designers and animators.

The syntax was simple yet powerful:

files:
  - path: /path/to/image-01.jpg
    id: 1
  - path: /path/to/image-02.jpg
    id: 2
  comps:
  - name: Slideshow
  - name: Slideshow images
    parentComp: Slideshow
    layers:
      - name: image 01
        file: 1
        outPoint: 1
      - name: image 02
        file: 2
        outPoint: 2

Here's me explaining the project:

Learning from the mistakes

1. Using Coffeescript: This started in ~2014 FYI. Coffeescript accelerated the development at first, but made it hard to maintain and for others to contribute to the open-source project later on.

2. Too much writing, not enough cleaning: I did not know how to properly strucutre such a complex project and the codebase got away from me.

3. Not asking for help: In hindsight, I should have asked for help sooner. I think a couple of people's input could have been valuable.

The future

Although it has been officially deprecated, I'm still using Hyle in my day-to-day work. It remain a great tool for setting things up in After Effects.

Will I ever come back to this project? I'm not sure. Probably not. But I still think such a thing is needed, and the problem it was trying to solve still exists to this day. So, who knows, maybe one day.