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Sterphy
Known Participant
September 28, 2022
Open for Voting

Folders in After Effects timeline

  • September 28, 2022
  • 115 replies
  • 16919 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.

115 replies

Participant
September 28, 2022
https://aescripts.com/workflower/
If a dude on aescripts could do it, you could do it. Or at least hire him! I love ae, but really: essential properties is of no use in a workflow with 150 layers or more. One thing is having priorities, one thing is organizing things. Subfolders are really a simple thing, as well as groups and layers. Please add it!
Known Participant
September 28, 2022
It's crazy isn't it. This is SUCH a simple feature, but would make a huge difference to complex timelines. At the very least they could add some stronger colours to the layer colour options too. The only one that really stands out is yellow. These are such basic things Adobe. It's really time you put folders in. Esp since development seems to have been quite light on AFX over the last few years. It's as if you're just doing the bare minimum now.
Participant
September 28, 2022
Its almost end of 2021 and covid, but still nothing about simple folder structure... Why can't Adobe work the way clients want and instead generate new sh*t by themselves and make it more complicated... i guess they will "Discover folders feature" when they will run out of ideas
Participant
September 28, 2022
Heartily agree. This is badly needed!
Participant
September 28, 2022
when you stop paying for a subscription, then adobe may think about it and start to improve something, and so continue to beg them, nothing will change from this
Adobe Employee
September 28, 2022
Hi Giorgio,

Good news!! Have you heard of Essential Properties (formerly called Master Properties)? You can add parameters from the timeline of a Primary Comp (and any nested comp within) into the Essential Graphics Panel and organize them into groups and sub-groups.

At that point, nest the Primary Comp into a new comp and twirl open the layer. You'll find all of the groups and subgroups that you've created in your timeline! This means you have access to whatever parameters you want to focus on, AND it also means you can create multiple versions of your Primary Comp using this method too. This allows you to Push and Pull any changed values back up to or from the Primary Comp.

Here's a little breakdown video of how these work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1ZsiQy764Q

And check out the attached image to see how the Groups and Sub-groups look in the timeline.

Hope this helps!
Dacia
Participant
September 28, 2022
Ps has it. Ai has it. InD (your other composition buddy) has it. Please give us a way to organize other than precomposing, please.
Participant
September 28, 2022
Please add this. Why are Adobe products which are industry standard so broken?
Participant
September 28, 2022
Hey everybody, give Cavalry a try to see what a folder-filled life could be like. It's sort of like what Figma or Sketch is to Illustrator but for After Effects. Not a full replacement but in the right cases really powerful and productive, and did i mention it has layer folders?
Participant
September 28, 2022
For the love of God, this question is from 2019 and summer of 2021 we still don't have this simple fix. Really hoping Adobe can address this.