I found this tip somewhere and thought I’d share this as the first in hopefully several posts of the “post a week ‘othon”.

To replace a layer in a composition with a new item from the project window select the layer to be replaced in the composition window. Press option and drag the item from the project window and drop it on top of the selected layer in the composition window. Simple.

This preserves everything you had done to the first layer. So this saves you the hassle from dropping in the new item, copying animation, effects and transforms.

I don’t know why I didn’t know before last week.

A few weeks ago I was looking through Jeff Almasol’s site redefinery.com (whose rd_ScriptLauncher script is awesome) and I wanted to create a script that utilizes a UI like his scripts do. I started looking through the AE scripting documentation and only found ScriptUI mentioned in the introduction.

After a bit of digging I found that the Bridge javascript reference (pdf) has a ScriptUI reference section. Not everything in there works with AE but most of it does. So now nothing should stop me from scripting awesomeness.