I have no idea if this would work in your situation... but I have a plugin which has Windows and Mac versions but won't survive the translation from a Windows project to a Mac project without becoming crash-prone and throwing out lots of error messages.

What saved me was the script "ft-Effect Instance" on AEscripts.com. It makes a duplicate of an effect instance and its settings (either by copying the values or by expressions.) Possibly if you used it, it would keep the settings, but insert the newer version of the effect.

You'd still have to do the process on each and every instance of the effect, but it might save you from having to copy all their settings. But given your mention about not being able to copy and paste settings, I don't know if it would work.

http://aescripts.com/ft-effect-instance/

Drew

newtonscannon.com

Just a guy made of dots and lines.

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 3:30 AM, Mathias Möhl <mamo181@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi Mark,

the plugin SDK contains clear instructions for plugin developers what you need to do to ensure backwards compatibility of your plugins.
Essentially reordering parameters and adding new ones is no problem, but as soon as you decide to exchange some controls by different ones, you loose the backwards compatibility (as there is obviously no way for AE to know how to turn the values from the old control into the new ones).

As scripting has the limitations mentioned by David, there won't be a fully automated solution in general.

Cheers,
Mathias

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Am 07.06.2013 00:00, schrieb After Effects Mail List:

From: Mark Walczak <mdwalczak@gmail.com>

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Hi everyone,

My company recently upgraded to CS6 from CS5, and we took the opportunity
to upgrade many of our plugins as well.  Tiffen was part of this
transition, and we went from v2.0.2.1 to 3.0.9.6.

Every time that we go to open a CS5 project that was created using v2
Tiffen effects, AE reports that the project contains several links to
effects that don't exist.  In reality, the effects are installed perfectly
fine on our boxes.  It simply seems that Tiffen didn't implement any way
for v3 effects to naturally inherit settings/keyframes from v2.

I just opened a trouble ticket with Tiffen, but the broader question I
wanted to ask pertains to upgrading plugins in general.

Is there any sort of script/tool that can batch apply old plugin settings
to new effects with the same name/attributes?  Unfortunately, you can't
even copy/paste between the two versions :-(


Thank you so much for your help!