After Effects Tricks: Don’t Lose Your Projects with Auto-Save

Have you every lost a video project in Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe After Effects?

If you haven’t… you will. And if you have… you know the excruciating pain it can be to have to rebuild a project. Obviously we should be saving our projects every few minutes or so. But the fact is, we are humans. We forget to save. We do a lot of work. And unlike Premiere Pro, After Effects doesn’t require you to create a project file to start working. There have been times that I’ve created complete compositions before I realized this After Effects project doesn’t even exist. Right now – it’s just a great idea. 

So to prevent any losses – please use the AUTO-SAVE feature.

Go up to the top menu – click AFTER EFFECTS – PREFERENCES – AUTO-SAVE. I save my projects ever 10 minutes. You can change the number of maximum project versions up to 999. But you don’t have to go overboard. Unless you think you’re going to need to go back to the project you were working on a few days ago, 5-10 versions should be fine.

You’ll see that your Auto-Save project files will now be saved in a folder titled ‘Adobe After Effects Auto-Save’ in the same folder as your project file is saved.

Hopefully this trick can save you headache, heartbreak, and any other unnecessary hair-pulling!

Cheers,
Phil