AE Scraper

AE Scraper

The scraper reads your open After Effects project and writes a single JSON receipt. It cannot modify your project — this is proven by an automated guard, not just promised.

Run it

1. Open your project in After Effects.
2. File → Scripts → Run Script File…
3. Navigate to integrations/after-effects/MographJailed_ProjectScraper.jsx in your MographJailed checkout and open it.
4. Pick the folder where the receipt should be saved.
5. Done. You'll get a file like MyProject.20260929T150000Z.scrape.json.

No installation, no restart, no preferences changed. Your project is exactly as it was — the scraper has no code path that saves, closes, or edits anything.

What's in the receipt

• Project name, path, After Effects version, scrape timestamp
• Every comp (up to 200): name, size, frame rate, duration
• Every layer (up to 500 per comp): name, type
• Expressions on animated properties (capped at 2,000 characters each)
• Effects applied per layer
• Fonts used
• Footage items (up to 2,000): name, path, missing/unlinked flags
• Truncation flags if any bound was hit, so you know the receipt is partial

The full field list is in docs/MJ_PROJECT_SCRAPE_1.md in the repo.

Bounds (so it can't run away)

Bound	Value
Comps	200
Layers per comp	500
Footage items	2,000
Expression length	2,000 chars
Total receipt	~5 MB

Everything is traversed in deterministic order, so two scrapes of an unchanged project produce identical receipts.

The read-only proof

scripts/check-scraper-readonly.sh in the repo statically scans the scraper for every After Effects DOM mutation pattern — save, remove, add, replace, setValue, addKey, duplicate, project close, undo groups, app.executeCommand, and more. If any appear, the build fails. Run it yourself:

bash scripts/check-scraper-readonly.sh
# → SCRAPER_READONLY_OK

What to do with the receipt

Feed it to the CLI:

mj project.ingest path=/path/to/MyProject.20260929T150000Z.scrape.json
mj expression.lint path=/path/to/MyProject.20260929T150000Z.scrape.json

Or point the Dashboard at your receipts folder and watch it light up. Details: Tier 0 Observer.