After years of using AE and always explicitly typing in output filenames I recently had a project where this became too tedious so finally investigated a better way, and was very happy to find the token naming system. I generally want my output file names to be the same as the comp name, so that I know where they came from. Using the "[project name]" token got me what I need. I set my projects up so that "Project_V001" renders a file called "Project_V001.mov". When I increment to V002, it will render "Project_V002.mov". It's that simple.
However, on this particular job I want to use a master AE project to render out a bunch of other projects. When these are brought in, the output file name does not respect the source project and instead defaults to the name of the master project. This makes sense, but also seems to be a bit of design flaw. Is there any way to use tokens in this way and have them respect the name of the original source project? I know there are other tokens available, e.g. naming after the source comp, however that would also require manual renaming which defeats the purpose.
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