Hi,
This toolkit looks amazing, I was wondering if it can possibly automate (some or all of) the following:
I have a simple ae project with lots of comps inside it.
For each comp in the project panel:
Hi @ksdomino , welcome to the forum!
Sorry for the late reply, this automation was quite difficult to create as I wanted to automate all the steps you mentioned together, it also was difficult because the automation needs to save this .aep file with different project name and then re-open the original project file again and in this process we lose the the link to the project items we saved before closing the project, I solved this issue by saving the id’s of the compositions so I can get them easily after closing and opening the project.
I left comments over the lines but if you are new to the extension it will be very hard to understand, I recommend to start with simpler automations.
The automation will search for a folder named “Comps” in the project panel and it will work on all the compositions inside this folder, so move all the compositions inside this folder.
The output reduced Aep files will be created in the folder that contains the original project folder under a subfolder named “reduced_comps”.
Download -
Reduce Comps.json (54.7 KB)
make sure to check these 2 options,
create external files for creating the .aep files and running javascript code to run the reduce operation without the message window.
Please let know if it works or if you have any questions,
Thanks,
Alon
Thanks so much for the prompt reply! I was away for the weekend but am testing this right now and will update this post within the next couple of hours.
Thanks again for all your help so far!
EDIT: Tested it and it works wonderfully! Just one minor issue and a couple of questions:
minor issue: It opens a bunch of windows all showing the contents of : appdata/roaming/aescripts/automation toolkit free but that’s a minor issue.
It also opens a window showing the reduced project files which could be useful but not necessary but I can just manually close all of the open windows when it’s done so that’s no problem.
Questions:
Hi @ksdomino,
Sorry for the issues you are experiencing, it seems that the Automation Toolkit behaves a little differently and not exactly as planned on your computer.
This issue is very strange because there is not a single line in the automation that suppose to open any window, also not the “the reduced project files” folder.
In my computer it won’t open any window so it will probably be quite hard to investigate this issue, I guess you are using windows, I am running windows 10, maybe you are running windows 11? also what version of After Effects are you running?
could it be that there are missing fonts in the original project?
just to make sure can you check if the missing fonts message also pops up when opening main project?
when running the automation it will save a reduced project and then it will re-open the original project so if the original project have missing fonts it will show the missing font message multiple times.
You can also just disable the missing font message from the preferences of after effects before running the automation as a quick fix,
the “collect files” function is not supported in after effects scripting by adobe so we can only use menu command to open the menu from “file, dependencies, collect files” but you will need to set the properties in the pop up window manually and click collect.
Windows 10, AE 2023. I’ll do a screen recording if it helps you but for me its a non-issue as I just close all the windows after the automation has run so there’s no interference.
Wow that will help as I get that message a lot when I’m not using text. Very much appreciate this.
Seems this automation negates the need for collect files anyway as all the assets seem intact (probably because of the way the project is reduced).
All in all it works very well. last question: Is it possible to parse ( I think that’s the right word) subfolders within the comps folder…for example comps/arrows, comps/lines, comps/shapes…where each of those subfolders has multiple subfolders eg arrow1, arrow2, arrow3…each of those folders has 2 comps inside! I can send an example if needed but I’m guessing it would take alot of code to deal with that so no worries…am very grateful for you providing the script! Thanks so much again!
Sure!
it actually my bad as I mistakenly didn’t account for the situation of subfolders and it for sure makes the process longer, thanks for letting me know!
This is actually the easiest fix, I just had to check a loop checkbox called “subfolders” that tells the loop to run on all the subfolders and their content.
Download (v2) -
Reduce Comps v2.json (55.1 KB)
Let me know if you have more questions
Thanks
Alon
Thanks so much! I’ll give it a thorough test this week!
Thanks again! 
