Wow, where did the week go? Before it’s too late, I have a little gem to share, a script that I myself requested and Jeff Almasol built.
If you do the right thing in After Effects of creating a folder structure in the Project panel to organize assets, you will find that you have a minimum of 3, and often more than a dozen individual folders. These might be as simple as Source, Solids and Pre-comps, or they might be further divided down to have folders specifying what kind of source, and in what order/priority of pre-comp.
If you’re keeping this structure specific, there’s a situation that will come up that MergeProjects solves: namely, what to do if you ever need to incorporate another project into your existing one. When you import a new project, all of its duplicate (redundant) folders are nested into its own source Project panel folder.
This script looks inside that folder for folder names that match those in folders outside of it. It literally merges the project as organized inside that folder with the folders outside of it. That’s all it does, but it’s a classic case of saving you from an otherwise tedious task, and one that you might undertake repeatedly on a large project.
The catch? The official source for this script is the disc for my book After Effects Studio Techniques, where it has been part of the last several editions. Jeff offered it as an incentive to readers, and we’ve kept it that way. I don’t offer it here as a ploy to sell more books, but only because I think it’s worth mentioning in its own right, and may not even be known to readers of the book who haven’t investigated all of the bundled material in it.