Disorganized project files have bugged me for the longest time. Everyone has dealt with it at one point or another. Your co-worker is unorganized and brings assets into a project haphazardly, a client supplies you with a jumbled mess of a project as a starting point, an outside artist passes off their half done work over to you to finish, etc… While not everyone is messy with their projects, there is a large amount of disorganized users out there that could benefit from learning a little bit of organizational respect, for all our sakes. Awhile back I had developed a script just for these people, actually for myself because of those people. I figured I would share it, for free, with all of you as it can be a very helpful tool. “Organize Project Assets” is an After Effects scripts I built to do a foundational cleanup of a project. It helps get it in at the very least a starting point to where you can better hunt for what you need. It’s not super fancy, but it does put things in their place, literally. Precomps in a precomp folder, solids in a solid folder, and all footage into folders based on their file extension type. So all jpg’s go into a jpg folder, wav’s into an wav folder and so forth. Now if I can only write a script to translate their lack of naming conventions. Maybe someday I will be able to read minds, just maybe.
This is a standard script and has no dockable panel or interface. Just place this script in your After Effects “Scripts” folder, NOT the “ScriptUIPanels” folder. If you are an ft-Toolbar user, you can easily add a button and assign this script for quick access to launch it. The script should be compatible with CS3 or newer. I have only tested it on CS6, so if you encounter an issue, please feel free to let me know in the comments below.