• Adobe After Effects

  Replacing Assets

  Posted by Laurie Gibbs on February 27, 2009 at 3:18 pm

  Hello,

  I am wondering if anybody can help. I have created a piece of motion graphics which displays a series of photographs. Does anybody know a way of duplicating the timeline and then replacing the photographs so I can end up with a series of 15 pieces of identical graphics each displaying a different set photos?

  The only way that I have been able to do this is saving alternated versions of the project and then using the replace footage tool. This means that I cannot set up a render queue once complete. Or it means the mind-mudding task of replacing all the photos manually and they are part of quite complex animation many within multiple pre-comps.

  Any ideas? A bit of scripting? An obvious button I’ve never noticed? – I’d be very grateful.

  Thanks,

  Laurie

  Noah Poole replied 17 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Dave Johnson

  February 27, 2009 at 4:18 pm

  This recent thread might have some ideas that would help:
  (thread) reloading photoshop files in AE issue by Rusty Bek on Feb 19, 2009 at 5:21:19 pm
  https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/951400#951400

  Also, you don’t need multiple projects, but if you’ve already made them, you can import them all into one main project (just like importing media) and they’ll each bring whatever is in their render queues so you can render them all at once instead of one at a time.

  I’m not sure what you mean by “replacing all the photos manually” … there is no automatic way for AE to know which photos you want to replace and what to replace them with, but you can get close enough with some creative use of file naming and folders.

  For example, you could do this…
  Move the completed project file to its own folder on your hard drive along with all the photos used in that project and change the photo file names to a generic sequence like “001.jpg”, “002.jpg”, etc. Then, duplicate that folder as many times as you need and just replace the photo files with different photos, but using the same file name. When you re-open each duplicate project in AE, it’ll have everything the same except the photos themselves (you might have to ZIP up each project folder as you move to the next one so AE doesn’t find the original photos). Then, going back to my first point about importing all the projects into one, do that to get one project with everything in it. I probably missed a detail or two, but should be close enough to convey the general ideas.
• 

  Laurie Gibbs

  February 27, 2009 at 5:05 pm

  Thanks very much for your response. I have continued researching this afternoon and found a simple shortcut which solves my problem:

  By selcting the layer I wished to replace in the compostion, then select the asset I wished to replace it with and pressing “Ctrl+Alt+/” it then replaces the asset while maintaining all of the layers properties and animation.
• 

  Dave Johnson

  February 27, 2009 at 5:28 pm

  I’m glad you found a solution. Yes, CNTRL+ALT to replace media in timelines is very useful.

  I thought you didn’t want to replace the layers “manually” … perhaps that you had hundreds of layers/photos and it would’ve been too time consuming to replace each layer in each timeline that way. So, I was trying to think of ways around that, which using separate folders and changing the names of files through a batch process would accomplish.
• 

  Noah Poole

  February 27, 2009 at 7:15 pm

  Option-Dragging the new file from the project window over to the file you want to replace in the composition’s timeline will do the same thing.

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up