Remove Spaces/Sanitize Text in Output File Names

When working in a remote/hybrid team production environment across multiple operating systems, filesystems, and cloud storage/syncing services, busted filenames tend to break things or work unexpectedly for different users.

Sure, some users love to use exotic naming (usually to sort files in their preferred manner), and if they want to continue shooting themselves in the foot, let ‘em 😆 . But if the File Name and Location Template panel or After Effects’ preferences could have a setting to enable automatic naming sanitization, that’d be awesome.

Some automatic naming could be:

• Spaces could be automatically replaced by underscores, or removed when the first character is a space.
• Accented characters replaced with unaccented equivalents (ñ to n, é to e, etc. I realize this could be complex for non-English users)
• Remove/prevent special characters and punctuation, like !@#[] etc, etc.

Currently when picking up work from others, I use another app to rename/sanitize filenames and this would save a step or two.

And of course adding more tokens to File Name and Location Template would also be great, but that’s an idea for another post!