Saving Presets

Joe Clay | Feb 20, 2017

This has been updated.

Saving presets can be a real pain in After Effects. But it doesn't have to be—I think. I could be totally wrong. That's the, uh, beauty of saving presets in After Effects. And it gets even prettier, if you're saving in CC 2017, it might point you to the 2015 user presets folder by default, so keep your eyes open to see all the beauty.

So last week, I needed to save my named groups in a shape layer for the Speed Lines preset so it'd make sense. So I did what I remember usually doing—while probably failing—hitting UU and selecting the keyframes. Then I selected the effects one by one because I remember that working. Well, it turns out, depending upon what you select, things will keep their names or not. Uh, what?

So after an hour of wasting my time testing, and testing even more to write this article. I just discovered that even the way I showed in the Speed Lines tutorial was selecting too much. You barely need to select anything. In fact, you really only seem to need to get specific with what you select in order to exclude things.

So if you want to save all your named shape groups, just select Contents. If you want your expression controls and effects, just select Effects. And if you want to select your transform keys/expressions/whatever, select Transform. And if you want to select the name of the layer, hahahaha.