Pure Collect AE

Requirements

Quick start

1. Select the comps you want in the Project panel. Select as many as you like. With nothing selected, the active comp is used.

2. Open the panel. Window → Extensions → Pure Collect AE

3. Choose Folder & Name… Pick where the collection goes and what it is called.

4. Check the comps to keep. The list under Project diet drives everything — checked comps are collected, get their own folder, and survive the diet. Comps used as precomps are marked precomp.

5. Press Scan. You get comp and footage counts, the number of image sequences, a total size, and a warning for anything offline.

6. Press Collect.

Before you collect. Bring every footage item online — missing items are excluded, not collected. Save the project so the collection reflects your latest edit. Collecting SSD to SSD is dramatically faster than over a network.

What you get

Project diet

The checkbox list is the control surface for the whole tool.

Expressions are followed

After Effects’ built-in reduceProject does not trace expression references. A gradient or colour controller comp referenced only by comp("Gradient Typewriter Color") gets deleted, and your colours break.

Pure Collect AE scans the expressions in the comps you keep and preserves everything they reference — following chains recursively, and recognising both quote styles and spacing variants. The number of items rescued is logged.

Dynamic references. If an expression uses a reference that can’t be resolved without running it — comp(myVariable) or comp(1) — everything of that kind is kept conservatively and a warning appears in the log. Nothing breaks; the collection is simply larger than it strictly needed to be.

Image sequences and render passes

Every frame of every sequence is copied into its own folder and reconnected with replaceWithSequence, so a sequence stays a sequence.

Passes belonging to one shot are grouped together. shot01_beauty, shot01_shadow and shot01_AO land in a single shot01/ folder — After Effects still reads each pass correctly, because the filename prefixes differ.

Grouping only happens when the trailing token is a recognised render pass name. The dictionary covers the standard AOV and multipass outputs of Redshift, Octane, Arnold, Cinema 4D, and Blender’s Cycles and EEVEE, plus the common ones every renderer shares — Z, Depth, Normal, Position, UV, MotionVector, Cryptomatte, AO, Shadow, Albedo, Roughness. Compound names (diffuse_direct), separator variants, camelCase, and trailing digits are all recognised.

Filename collisions. If two genuinely different sequences would land in the same folder and overwrite each other’s frames, they are split into separate folders automatically and the log says so. Frames never get mixed.

Organize project panel

Which folder a comp belongs to is decided by layer sources and expression references, so a colour controller used only through an expression lands with the comp that needs it instead of drifting to the root.

Solids, adjustment layers and nulls are all stored by After Effects as the same kind of item, so they cannot be told apart at project level and share one folder.

Clean My Project applies this to the project you have open, with no collection and no saving. Undo with Ctrl/Cmd + Z.

Limits