long shot – any suggestions how to identify identical comps

[Richard Garabedain]

I mean..not ro insult your intelligence but you have tried the reduce project?

[Joe Kaye]

haha, any suggestions are welcome – i got myself into this mess

The project is already reduced (but still pretty big).

To explain a little more, my main composition is about 7mins long with a bunch of scenes (each scene a subcomp) which have recurring visuals often with slight differences. Each scene goes roughly 6 subcomps deep (with a few different branches) and at the moment every scene and every subcomp is unique in my project. There are quite a few subcomps that get repeated through different scenes however that don’t need to be unique – that’s the part of my project I would like to reduce, ideally without having to do all the legwork myself!

[Joe Kaye]

Thanks Dave – I agree, I’ll need to spend more time on organising my work in future AE projects. Naming and grouping comps based on the kind of content is top of the list – one name prefix for small subcomps that will definitely stay constant, another for animated objects that might have different actions in different scenes (but not always), another for comps with multiple objects that will definitely change per scene etc.

I started weeding out needless dupes in this project but the time it would take to get through the whole thing relinking and deleting is not worth the effort – if I ever revisit the project it will only be for small elements which can be reduced and organised on demand as you said.

[Dave LaRonde] “It sounds like you’re relying on AE to do ALL the work when it doesn’t have to.

You can render out individual scenes, import therm into Premiere Pro and cut them together there. LOTS faster!”

I’m already using premiere to keep a final render, then rendering the parts I update in after effects when i need to – is that what you mean? Or is there more I can do to speed things up in this regard?

[Joe Kaye]

haha, yup I have to admit I sometimes find myself wondering if AE is the best tool for this job but I think it still is… as far as any single app can be!

It’s a mixed bag of keying, 2d and 3d animating (often animating movement of the footage), basic grading – the only thing i’m not doing is sound. I do use illustrator to design 2d elements though

Again, thanks for the help

[Cole Bo]

Something that I generally will do is go to the project panel and search “Unused”. This will show everything that is not being used. From my understanding, that does the same thing as Reduce Project. If you have any unnecessary duplicates of footage, solids, compositions or any other project material. Then I would recommend checking out a script called Project Cleaner on the AEscripts website. It’s a free script you can download too. Hope this helps!

[Daniel Waldron]

I can’t remember where I heard this (probably here on Creative Cow), but someone said Premiere is horizontal and After Effects is vertical. Using the programs in that way can help keep things organized and also makes revisions way easier to export.