Is there a merge feature in a team project in After Effects v 17.02?

[Andrii5EF2]

I recently started working with my teammate in a shared project and as far as I understand there are only 2 options 

- You can retain your version. (basically ignore changes)

- You can retain the shared version. (ignore yours and take teammates version)

- You can copy and rename your version before accepting the shared version (leads to cluttering)

We have multiple compositions each containing text layers with 20+ languages. I am responsible for the first half of text layers, my teammate for the second respectively.

If I share changes I made in 1-10 layers then my teammate can accept my changes, but HIS 10-20 text layers get replaced with empty mine. If I accept his changes, it happens vice versa. My own 1-10 layers turn empty and 10-20 like my teammate. 

What is this?? Can't AE just find and merge ONLY the changes been made in layers not entire compositions? Is this the way your company percieves teamwork? This is even worse if I ZIP my project and send it over to my teammate. At least he would be able to import changes. Am I missing something or it's working as intended?

[lena.gambatese]

Hi @Andrii5EF2,

My name is Lena, and I'm leading user experience design for Team Projects.

Unfortunately at the moment we don't have a way to merge edits made by multiple team members in the same composition.

I'm really sorry to hear that this limitation caused you and your team so much trouble.

I know this doesn't help a lot right now, but I can assure you that this is currently one of our biggest priorities and are working on some improvements and new features to make collaboration better (more on this later).

Have you tried moving the text layers that each one of you work on into separated nested compositions?
This way you can both work simultaneously, and since you're editing different compositions you wouldn't run into conflicts when sharing your changes.
If that's not an option for you, then you may have to either take turns at editing the text layers, or work on separate copies of the composition and move all the layers into one once you're both done.

These workarounds are clearly not the most efficient way of collaborating, but hopefully they can help until we can make things better.

And speaking of making things better, as I mentioned earlier we're working on a few improvements to our collaboration features which I believe can help your team.

Would you be open to talk with us and share more details about how you work?
I may be able give you an early look at what we're working on, and use your feedback to help us make sure we're building it in a way that will help teams like yours the most.
Let me know if you're interested and we can continue the conversation through private messages.