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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Expressions Failed expression because of the identical comp names

  • Failed expression because of the identical comp names

    Posted by Hiro Ober on March 11, 2019 at 2:18 am

    Hi guys,

    I apologise if this has been asked, but I couldn’t think of an effective keyword to search for this issue.

    I built a template that uses expressions, and I refer to some other precomp names in this project. All work fantastically. But from time to time, I need to import some old jobs that use the same template into the new project, which leads to have multiple projects with the same structure. Then my expression will fail because there are several precomps that share the same name. For sure the solution is as easy as changing the precomp names from the old jobs so that the expression won’t get confused which one is which. But my question is that is there a way that I can add some sort of prefix/suffix for all the precomps when I import them in, then I don’t have to jump in to find the identical names for precomps. Maya has this feature to avoid the same issue and it works very well, that’s where I got my inspiration from. I’m aware that AE may not have the same feature, but just wondering is there any other work around?

    Hopefully it’s easier to see it as below.

    Max Haller replied 5 years, 11 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Arthur Hakhverdian

    March 21, 2019 at 9:52 am

    I’m trying to think of a work-around here. My initial hope was to identify the specific instance of Auto_Product 02 by the containing bin, but evidently, unlike scripts, expressions are blind to bins.
    What else can we do here? Say, is the expression that’s trying to address Auto_Product 02 its (grand)child or is it external to it? Does it at least share hierarchical ancestry with Auto_Product 02?

    Down the line, if I knew what this whole thing is supposed to serve as a step towards accomplishing, perhaps I could offer a more fundamental solution that bypasses the need for what you’re asking for altogether.

    To provide a direct answer to your question, I suppose one could conceivably write a script that would automatically rename the imports.

  • Alex Printz

    March 21, 2019 at 3:53 pm

    No, there is no way to fix this by default. You could potentially build a script to append names with a specific string ((something like select the bin, script looks for all comps and adjusts the layer name).

    Alex Printz
    Mograph Designer

  • Max Haller

    March 22, 2019 at 7:57 pm

    Can’t think of a way to automatically do this, but there are a few plug ins that let you batch rename comps/ search and replace comp names. I use bq_ProjectPanelNavigator for that. I’m not 100% sure the expressions will update but you can try to just select the trouble comps and add a suffix to them to differentiate them.

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