Project Wiper v.1 for Adobe After Effect ( Free Tool )

Hey,

I made a tool for all authors who use Adobe After Effect to make your life easy after I made mine so :grin: Because I am sick of cleaning my projects file by file and folders by folders and sometime I delete an important files from the project ā€¦ What A Mess. So, I start thinking to solve this problem with this tool. It clean your project smoothly from any files that didnā€™t exist in your main comp & I am very happy to be here among you lovely people.

Note :

  • If you have files that arenā€™t in your main comp they will be deleted after you excute the tool.
  • I tasted on AE CC 2018 & 2020
  • My OS is Win10

If you have any suggestions and feedback, I will be happy to hear that :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Thanks to @Manriquedelara @mgscoder @KingDog

Download from Here

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Uhm, what is the difference to the ā€œReduce projectā€ function of After Effects?

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Good Question, Itā€™s strength is that it is an open, flexible and I can develop it more but all that is according to users needs and suggestions. I think Adobe donā€™t have the time to develop it more but may be there are users who need different things or add different features to it and this is why Adobe made wide space to develop and build new tools from scratch and Blender is a good example for my idea.

What do you suggest ?

Actually the reduce project function works fine for me, so I do not have any new suggestions, sorry.

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Developer seeks the oneā€™s need from 100000. :slight_smile:

I would like a tool that checks the whole composition to see which layers are ā€œutilizedā€ and which are not and would delete the useless ones. The used layers would be either visible ones, or turned off ones being used for masking, set matte effects, as a distortion maps, expressions, or simply driving some other layers animation that is linked to it through pick whip. This would be AMAZINGLY useful I think :smiley: But not sure how viable such a tool is.

Now whenever I work on a project I always like to test different ideas and techniques, so by the time I finish the project I always have many similar layers in the same composition that are turned off and donā€™t do anything. And obviously by then the project structure becomes very complicated and distinguishing each useful layer from useless becomes a very tedious task, where you need to check what each layer does manuallyā€¦ And then god forbid if you accidentally delete a ā€œusefulā€ layer and only notice this the next day, when you canā€™t simply undo your deletion and then need to recreate it againā€¦ :exploding_head:

You need to be specific for the word unused because whenever you add a layer in the comp it will be used according to how the program see them ( AE ) but to you it is not. So, I need some conditions for the term unused according to your needs beside the turned off layer for example :
Me to AE / this layer is turned off & I donā€™t use it, Please delete it
AE to ME / I will do sir. I will delete every one is turned off
ME to AE / Oh God No, you deleted everything
AE to ME / Because you didnā€™t be specific & it is your fault not me

The best way to keep your project clean, is not creating mess at all. First of all itā€™s important for you, not for users.
So I follow 2 rules:

  1. Keep everything in one comp. Never ever pre-comp (use it only for placeholders).
  2. When itā€™s needed to test something, or make another version. Duplicate comp as many times as many version is needed. After all ā€œIncrement and saveā€ and delete all versions except the final.

Repeat it for each element in your project.
This way your project will always stay clean and easy navigating.

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  • Some artists focus on testing, adding, deleting and other technical procedures rather than make thing organized and at the end they will organize the project in short the pipeline will ( Building Phase > Organizing Phase ).
  • Others have the ability to work with both Phases ( Building & Organizing ).

Oh, just wanted to write this. You read my mind. Organization of work is a very important thing. I also always keep my projects clean. And I do it in a process, not at the end :+1:

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Hmm I like to focus on the artistic side of things first, without worrying about technical stuff. Once artistic work is done, then technical stuff gets cleaned up :smiley:

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I understand what you are talking about. It depends on the type of thinking, character of a person. But still, in the working process, you need to keep in mind the thing that it is worth keeping at least partial organization

@HardEdgeie @Atamotion
One thing doesnā€™t exclude the other. Even more, good organizing helps to work faster and productive. While mess is productive only for the 1st - 2nd day of work. Then itā€™s start to slow down you.

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Youā€™re probably rightā€¦ :sweat_smile:

Interesting. I would have said that one giant comp with hundreds of layers is bad housekeeping. I like to precomp into logical subgroups.

Not the first time we disagree on a fundamental level :smiley:

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Right naming, labeling, search in timeline panel and shy, lock buttons do the thing. Sometimes markers. Also I rarely have more than 100 layers.

Anyway what works perfect for me and my types of projects, doesnā€™t mean that it would be a good solution for others. Maybe if I created logo reveals and not packs of titles, I would go with one extra level deep in pre-comps. But still prefer to view whole project at once.

What Iā€™m trying to say. Create your own project organization rules and stick to them.

Recently I start to use git for version control of my expressions. And itā€™s probably overfeatured solution, but that works perfectly for me. Knowing that somebody organize a project after it was done, makes me pain. :grin:

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You are totally right and I agree with you. I am not a professional coder but I can translate from coder perspective.

good organizing helps to work faster and productive.

  • Good Organizing means for me good tool ( program ) that can solve certain problem for the artist.
  • Work faster is saving the costs of resources like time, money and get ride of tedious tasks.
  • And productive is giving the artist the ability to break the rules of hardwareā€™s and softwareā€™s limits and stay productive @Atamotion.

But everyone has itā€™s way of thinking plus character of a person as @romlam said before. So, this lead us in to one thing is the development and the progress either for technological side or artistic side with one way which is organizing tasks or coding tasks the same meaning from different perspective. In other words organizing things either by humans or programs.

This thread make me think about different thingā€¦
We all use different tools and techniques. For you it was perfect to have a clean up tool, so you built it. But it turned out that others use different methods to keep project clean, and your tool isnā€™t needed.
I use several of my own scripts on a daily basis, and donā€™t know how to live without them. One of them I also shared here on forum (old version, right now I have working version for MacOS). For several years I donā€™t use pick whip tool at all, I use my solution. And canā€™t even imagine how life is hard for millions of motion designers who donā€™t know about my script. :grin:

And this is where we are. Itā€™s not so difficult to create a tool (script, app, plugin, software, etc.), but itā€™s hard to make people really interested in it!

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agreeā€¦ I learned a lot from purchasing various project here. I really liked how Minimalab organized his projectsā€¦ using the simple Aqua color for most of his layers. Its a cleaner look and less confusing for the purchaser.