Folders in After Effects timeline

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 28, 2022
113 replies
16573 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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burst5CF5

Participant

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

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Anthonymation

Participant

Heartily agree. This is badly needed!

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владк38537542

Participant

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

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Dacia Saenz

Adobe Employee

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

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Asintoto

Participant

Ps has it. Ai has it. InD (your other composition buddy) has it. Please give us a way to organize other than precomposing, please.

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Levi5E8C

Participant

Please add this. Why are Adobe products which are industry standard so broken?

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k.a.r.l.2000

Participant

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?