Renaming Layers With After Effects

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about layers and footage another level of organization. When you get into a after effects project in you have multiple layers, like we do in this one, sometimes it can get confusing as to what all these layers are and where they are in your composition. Especially, if your going to be passing your composition on to another editor. So, one of the things we can do is rename these layers to help us identify what they actually are. Now this column can be toggled by clicking on it from layer name to source name. The source name is just going to tell you what the file is actually title as it originally exists in your browser or in the file name itself. What you can do is toggle this column to layer name instead or source name and if you click on a layer and press enter you can now edit the name of that layer. What we're going to do here is just rename the layers I have for these mountain layers. This would be the foremost layer so let's name it front mountains. Let's look at this other one. Number two is the back mountains and three would be the middle ground, lets say middle mountains. So, instead of having one, two ,three we actually now have meaningful titles. When you change these titles it's not going to change the file name it's simply a reference within after effects. But, it will be very helpful for any one editing your project and would make things much easier to identify in your project. Start using this practice and I'm sure it will help things run much smoother for you."