• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Basic question: Renaming layers break expressions?

  Posted by Anders Carlsson on August 17, 2011 at 10:40 pm

  I haven’t used expressions very much yet so this might be a stupied question. Anyway, say that I pickwip Layer 1 position to Layer 2 position with “thisComp.layer(“Layer 2″).position” (or something like that, I’m not at an AE computer at the moment. This all works until I rename layer to to Layer 3 for example, which would break the expression. I was under the impression that AE could handle renaming of layers and update the expression. Should I write the expression in another way?

  Rob Frese replied 11 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  August 17, 2011 at 11:22 pm

  The expression text should update automatically, unless you’re using an old version of After Effects.

  Dan
• 

  Anders Carlsson

  August 18, 2011 at 9:37 pm

  I just tried it again and it updated correctly. I must have made something wrong when I tested earlier. Thanks for the reply Dan, this is a great forum!
• 

  Rob Frese

  July 3, 2014 at 4:07 pm

  I’m using AE CC and this still happens a lot.

  It’s inconsistent. Sometimes I rename a layer and the expressions update. Sometimes I rename a layer, the expressions don’t update and break and I have to manually go in and edit each expression to reflect the new layer name.

  What gives? Why does it work sometimes and not other times? Is there some weird thing I have to have checked to make that happen?

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