How to secure AE project files?

I mean if you try to make pirates live harder, you will not leave simple placeholder for them. You will try to hide them, use many copies and etc.

It is not that hard to find all textfiles in a project, or search for the ones that have the text I entered.
I can select the Output comp and reduce the project to get rid of not used pre-comps as well. I can write a simple script that gets rid of all invisible pre-comps etc. etc.

All ideas I heard by now are too easy to fix to really be an obstacle to anyone experienced in AE or Scripting or both.

Nothing can be 100% secured, of course.
I will not hold you anymore. Do not be late for the meeting.

If I find time, I will try to create aep file where you couldnā€™t change the text. Only after few hours maybeā€¦ :wink:

I honestly would love to see that :slight_smile:

Challenge accepted! :sweat_smile:

Hi!
Here is the file (AE CC 2018). Try to change the text without destroying the animation.
Good luck! :wink:

Just checked! Not bad =)

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Donā€™t really understand what your agenda is here. You do have to admit that this is not at all practicable in a real life scenario. You are changing the source text with expressions and by this artificially create a write-on effect.
There is no animation that you secure, the whole animation is written in code. And that is not possible for everything that AE can do, and obviously not the way someone who created an AE template would do it. He would do it with Keyframes.

Even if you say you can write a script that turns write-on animated keyframes into this code, you have to admit this does only work with this single write on effect and nothing else. So if you just want to feel smart, well, okay, you can obfuscate your expression for the source text in which you used a lot of ā€œ(if time < x)ā€ then str = TRY ___" and so on.

I can still go in and change your code, although this is nothing close to a real life scenario so if that is all you can come up with then Iā€™m not impressed :wink:

Here you have your aep back with some subtle changes:
http://creattivedesigns.com/uploads/changedtext.aep

No, I didnā€™t take the time to make the underlines match the text or the cursor - there is no sense in wasting time for it .

Man, donā€™t be so angry. take your source text if you need it so much.
In this variant you will have some normal results, but not with all text.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SMSXLlas8HMx2-to3LqD1A65H_QmlrkS/view?usp=sharing

UPD: Every text has different length, animation could only work with text that has 15 characters, etc. And that is ordinary behavior of many text animations.

Hello everybody, this discussion makes no sense any longer imo. To me personally would only make sense if Adobe and AE project markets worked together on ideas and possible solutions.

Yup, I see that.
The write-on effect may work like this, I give to you that a lot of text animations that happen directly on the layer can be linked to some source text properties and make it harder to change the text, but these are all methods that are applied only for one specific animation.
I thought the goal was to somehow secure any kind of AE template, with methods that work always.

Not angry, just disappointed :wink:

http://creattivedesigns.com/uploads/changedtext2.aep

You failed actually.
image
Symbol ā€œ>ā€ should be in the end:

image

UPD: As I said in my first post here. To create full protection that will work with a lot of different scenarios, personally I need a year or so. Because itā€™s rather hard to do for everything. And the effort of course will not worth it.

As I said, I didnā€™t want to spend time on the second layer as Iā€™m a lazy guy.

Pirates are also lazy, and not smart as you. Even with such a low protection as my last file has, they will not do anything.:slightly_smiling_face:
UPD: And here the file has only 3 layers for simplicity. But what will be if they see a real project with hundred different thingsā€¦

If I think about how much effort it is to crack real protected software I wouldnā€™t say pirates are lazy or not smart.

An AE Template may just not be a big enough target to be worth it for them. However, I have seen them go up and beyond to make videohive projects run for free, so if you have a big seller you wonā€™t be able to rely on the laziness of the people.

But this protection does only work with this specific animation of yours. The method of protection needs to be automated to be executed by a script and here I still see the problem.

You will have to come up with new methods of protection for every new animation. And to edit the template, a new script needs to be written every time.

And all of that just so that a lazy guy like me can fix it in a couple minutes xD

You idealize them. And comparison with software is not correct at all. I also may say: ā€œAll protection is useless, because they may simple hack reviewerā€™s PCā€, end of story. :smiley:
And, of course, if the item is a big seller and pirates wants it very much, they may break any sort of protection, they may simply go inside any script and change it as they want. They may break plugins, so it also will not help.
But we have a deal with a massive steal. With thousands of projects. It takes you couple of minutes? Multiply it to hundred. Because itā€™s not a point of one project with 3 layers.
Yes, of course, they may write a script to disable any expression and effect that protects a project. But they will do that only if a lot of projects will have the same protection. If it would be only your items, they will not care.

About automated script. The simplest approach would be to hide several random layers if textholder was changed. Write something like this ( text != "my text" ) ? 0 : value; and put this line in several random properties. There is not so huge problem to do it by the script, and it will be universal for any aep file.
And of course, you can bypass this protection in a minute. But pirates will not care. And the end users will probably fix it, or download another working file, or maybe some of them will buy an item.

Does such protection worth to be created? My answer is no. :rofl: But if I have already made script from somebody else, I will probably use it (if it would be comfortable to edit the text for real customers). And I think such sort of protection is much more effective than wasting time for sending DMCA (for ordinary items, not top sellers).

That the whole point. Not to create super protective file, but to make a little bit harder pirate life.

As I said earlier, in this case only the text layer needs to be duplicated and the original stays there as unlocker - but is hidden. Takes seconds, literally - but yeah you need to figure it out. If pirates care? Guess work. Still may be better than nothing - but the hassle you put on customers by only being able to customize the project with your script is a disadvantage as well in my eyes.

Agreed.

I thought the point was this (Emphasis is mine):

Or this:

If it was just about making pirates life a little tiny bit harder we would have agreed in the first place. But you wanted to prove that you can secure something for hours, and that didnā€™t work out. And you say you need one year of your life to make it universally applicable to any project so that did let me assume more projects will use that protection to earn you some money for your hard work - but then again if more projects use this kind of ā€œprotectionā€ there is a greater interest in breaking that.

I come to the same conclusion as MotionRevolver, even after our little dance here:

Iā€™m still happy to be proven wrong. But as we both agree that it is not worth the time this will probably never happen.

Cheers :slight_smile:

I should rephrase to there being no practical way to secure .aep files. At least not in a way that works easily for both for authors and customers. :laughing:

Iā€™ve even considered figuring out a way to secure or limit access to the source files linked to the .aep, but then again, not all Ae templates utilize linked media to be considered fully functional.

If anything ever happens in the future with the ability to secure .aep files, it will likely need to come from Adobe, as the embedded code/script of an .aep would need to be able to contain such a feature.

Considering how large the template industry as become, and how much of a pervasive problem piracy is, perhaps itā€™s time to begin lobbying Adobe for this kind of security feature?

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I think you can extrapolate. I didnā€™t want to spend much time for creating real life AE template, just to prove my point. But even with my small file with 3 layers, you didnā€™t want to spend your time for the second layer. And what would happen if you see something like this? :smiley:


I know that itā€™s a headache for real customers. But here I just want to prove that in many cases it may take really long time. :grinning:

True xD

But the point I was trying to make was: You have created animation specifically made for protection, not protection for a standard animation.

Sure you can copy that over and over again and ask me to decode it for each layer but this is not a real-life scenario.

I would like to see an AE Template from videohive protected - and these are usually looking like this: Text inside a pre-comp, this pre-comp is in a main comp and has effects applied to it.

The expression-protection has a limit of as soon as not everything is on a single layer - the animation keyframes as well as the placeholder. So this works only with simple text effects - but I admit it kind of works there.

And an even bigger problem: How to protect logo placeholders? These are always in a pre-comp and not animated on the footage file itself.

As long as you have your keyframes and aniamtion on your placeholder layer - I admit it is harder to decode (while still taking only minutes if you know what to do). It just is very rarely the case.