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Folders in After Effects timeline

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 28, 2022
123 replies
17322 views

Timeline folders. We have them in Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator... precomps can utterly ruin your work and is NOT an alternatives to having a simple folder hierarchy - especially when dealing with shape layers or anything that requires continual rasterization.

Compositing and VFX

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SterphyAuthor

Known Participant

It's no wonder their rating is 1.2* out of 5 on Trustpilot!

SterphyAuthor

Known Participant

Incredible that Adobe staff can't even bring themselves to even respond to this.

S

smanole

Participant

@llealloo it was @Sterphy simulation from 2022. We might not have groups for timeline layers but at least we have thread grouping in Adobe Community :))

llealloo

Known Participant

@JohnColombo17100380thanks for merging the topics together!

Any chance you could speak with your team about this feature request and let us know what they say? i.e. How feasible is this from a software engineering standpoint? I am curious to know, because if it is too hard I would like to stop asking about it. It would be nice to hear something/anything from the team at Adobe, because we have been asking for this for over 10 years with no response. Appreciate anything you can do to inform us of the vibe over there!

Warm regards,

Leah - 21 year AE expression & scripting expert, 18 years professional experience in motion graphics

llealloo

Known Participant

We are even pulling out the OG fonts (nice one @smanole with the Bank Gothic) to help get the point across. Let's keep it going folks!

S

smanole

Participant

Hi Adobe Team,

I wanted to bring up a life-saving feature that I believe would greatly improve the workflow in After Effects: layer grouping. Currently, the only way to organize multiple layers is by pre-composing them. However, once layers are pre-comped, all editing is confined to the precomp, making it difficult to adjust them later in the main composition. This is especially challenging for large, complex projects where you might want to maintain a higher level of flexibility.

In comparison, other Adobe tools like Photoshop and Illustrator have implemented the ability to group layers, making it easier to manage elements without losing direct control over the layers themselves. After Effects could benefit from this functionality as well, providing a better way to organize and manipulate layers without resorting to cumbersome precompositions.

I’m aware that this topic has been raised by multiple users in the past, but it’s still not available. I hope that Adobe will consider adding this feature in a future update, as it would significantly enhance the usability and efficiency of the software.

Thank you for considering this suggestion!

Best regards,

Stefan

melbendi

Inspiring

Agreed!

llealloo

Known Participant

I, for one, would love to see Adobe take a break focusing on adding AI tools to their products and spend half as much effort on fixing these systemic UX issues that have been going on for decades. I would be a much happier loyal customer if this happened.

llealloo

Known Participant

Adobe, please listen to your userbase and implement this feature! None of the band-aid solutions in this thread come close to how effective and seamless it would be as native functionality. Also, please consider the outpouring from your userbase over the years (in this thread) and perhaps a decade (or longer) across all of the other feature request forums. This feature has been requested time and time again, at this point probably from thousands of people.

Please add layer folders so we can better organize our composition layers!

M

meta-lingo

Known Participant

Maybe you could have a way to highlight/reveal/select all children? Or, a flyout like the one that appears when you hit the tab-key on the top of a timeline? Or, a view like Flowchart but with parenting?

An indicator if a layer has children is a great idea.

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