Why does After Effects drop the leading zeros when using increment and save

Forum|Forum|28 days ago
July 9, 2026
9 replies
58 views

I use AE on a few different client machines as well as my own. On ONLY one of those client machines, every time I use “Increment and Save” the new file drops the leading zeros in the version number.

For example MyProject_v001.aep increments to MyProject_v2

If I “SaveAs” MyProject_v002 and repeat “Increment and Save” the new project is MyProject_v2.

All of these machines are on Version 26.3.0. My first thought was there’s a new setting (since it’s never done this in 20 years of using AE). I checked nothing I could see.

Any ideas? Not critical but frustrating.

Thank you

Warren Heaton

Community Expert

Hi @mrtdg:

Which OS is this happening with?

I tried to reproduce this and increment and save is working as expected for project file names that have padding.

System info
Application: After Effects v26.3.0.87
OS: macOS v15.7.4, RAM: 128.00 GB GB, CPUs (logical): 16

As a troubleshooting step, what happens if you run After Effects in Safe Mode? I’d also check for any special characters in the file name and the file path and try removing those.

And yeah, this is frustrating.

- Warren

mrtdgAuthor

Inspiring

Same version of AE as you, but all systems are on Windows 11 64bit. Only one machine is doing this oddball thing. That machine differs mainly with an AMD cpu. It baffles me because I don’t see this on (now) 3 other Windows machines. Plugin-wise, the offending machine only has Red Giant Complete installed, where the others have many more.

As for the naming, the only “special” character I use is the underscore (no spaces) since my projects sometimes get picked up on Mac machines. Tested and made no difference.

Nishu Kushwaha

Community Manager

Are you saving the files in a shared location? If yes, try saving them locally. I tried the steps, and it seems to be working fine on my end as well.

Thanks,

Nishu

K

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi,

Thanks for the post. That doesn't sound very normal. Let me ask around a bit. Sorry for the frustration.

Cheers,

Kevin

takashi vfx

Inspiring

hey since we have attention of Adobe peeps, please also request making v000 increment to v001 instead of v2? most of my comp work we send v000 as scan check and v001 as actual work, and increment and save don’t work on v000. make it v000 to v001 as increment and save please.

thanks,

t

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