UN-rename/restore renamed footage?

[Dan Fredley]

• Select the item in the project panel.
• Then look at the top of your project panel and you’ll see the name you gave the item.
• Click on the name and you should see the layer number in parentheses
• Manually retype the name in the project panel

That’s the best I can do.

Dan Fredley

[Ben Jordan]

Thanks for your reply. It’s actually just showing me the name I gave it (in parenthesis). Below you can see I’ve named it “1” and the dropdown is showing me which comps & layers in those comps (normal behavior), and the name that it is using in those comps (It’s showing “1” on each because I have not re-named it in those comps).

I am trying to figure out which layer name it is in the Illustrator file, which has tons of layers. This happened also on a co-workers project, so I was hoping to figure out a way to retrieve that original imported name.

(You can see some of the other original names in the project area below the highlighted file. The one I accidentally renamed originally had a similar name, ##/NA map layers named.ai)

I exported as an XMP in hopes it saved the original name in there, but it did not (at least not in human readable form!).

[Peter Kmeť]

You can use simple script for this. (copy code below to text aditor and save it as .jsx)

var selectedItems = app.project.selection;
for (var i = 0; i < selectedItems.length; i++) {
    var item = selectedItems[i];
    if (item instanceof FootageItem && item.file !== null) {
        var originalFilename = item.file.displayName;
        item.name = originalFilename;
    }
}

In After Effect go to File – Scripts – Run script file – and open document you just created.
It will restore names of all selected items in project panels.

Original filename is stored in metadata but sadly After Effects dont have build in function to restore it.