aenhancers

Open EXR, the great format that it is, can have more channels than RGBA. It is usually used from 3D programs when you render out different passes, but in AE you could use it to render out several different alpha channels in one image for example. Nuke can render multichannel EXRs. Would there be a way to script the render settings/output moduels so that you could do the same in After Effects? EXRs are the standard of VFX work nowadays I believe.

Nope. That goes way beyond what any script could do and based on AE's API, there is no way to even write a file IO plug-in that works in this manner, so simply forget the idea....

Mylenium

The scripting api gives you access to the command line so theoretically you could write a script that renders the individual passes out of ae then through the command line invoke another script written in python that assembles all the passes into a multi-channel exr.

For example, in my Immigration script I call a custom perl script to return directory listings since it is much much faster than javascript at this task. So just because something is not directly available in the scripting API it doesn't necessarily mean it is not possible.

-Lloyd