Vertical position of Project window moves every time an asset is re-named.

[izzaack]

I'm not sure whether there's a work around for this but it's something After Effects hasn't always done. At somepoint over the last year or two the Project window has taken to 'jumping' position, vertically, once the name of a sequence, layer or general asset has been re-named. Or when a new folder or sequence has been created. When working with a large project, with a lot of assets, this can cause a lot of frustration and slow the process down considerably as I try and re-find the area of the folder structure I was working in.

Not sure whether it's just my system, or whether there's a solution, but I would love it if it justr stayed where it was.

[Field Kuang]

The AE Project Panel is sorted by Name by default.

If you have a long list of assets and rename an asset near the bottom of the list to a name that appears higher alphabetically, the item will move to the top of the list. The Project Panel will then automatically scroll up to make the renamed item visible in its new position. I’m not sure if this is the behavior you're describing.

If you prefer to avoid auto-scrolling after renaming assets, you could try clicking the 'Type' column header to sort the Project Panel by asset type instead.

[izzaack]

Hi Field, thanks for the reply. So I looked at the behaviour again and it happens when you're project is so big that you can't view all assets/folders at once and you're not focussed on the top most file in the bin. When you edit anything in the bin that item moves to the very bottom.

[Field Kuang]

Could you upload a screen recording? That will help me determine if it’s unexpected behavior, and I can file a bug if needed.

[izzaack]

Her's a screen recording of the behaviour.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/cv2ygaoofu3fnsenssxqu/AE.mov?rlkey=v7b5m3wll3xx7q9chf5h9r6vv&st=ye65m...

[Field Kuang]

The behavior shown in your screen recording does seem unexpected. Here is a screen recording of mine showing the project panel doing the right thing 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zTIW_vsilwTp2_WWiFelK0tm0XRNy2xE/view?usp=drive_link

It would be really helpful if you could try the following:

1. Go to the AE preference folder, back up and move all the preference files to another location. Then open your project and see if the project panel still behaves the same.

2. It appears that you are still using the old After Effects UI. We recently released a new version of AE with a UI facelift. I wonder if the new UI would have fixed this issue.

3. If either of the above steps gives you the correct behavior, I wonder if there could be a certain structure of the project that causes the Project Panel to behave this way. Try opening or creating another large project and see if the problem goes away. If the jumpy behavior only occurs with that one project, it would be really helpful if you could share it with me so I can investigate the root cause.

[Frank_B]

Same here. This has been happening for a long time now (throughout a couple of AE versions at least). Happens regardles if you work in the latest version or beta. Doesn't occur in a new project though.

EDIT: Removing all the preferences as suggested doesn't solve the issue.

[Field Kuang]

Seems like this is project dependent and I'm really curious what factors in the project made AE to do that. It would extremely helpful if you could share a non-NDA version of the problematic project with me. Feel free to DM me on that. Thanks!