Adobe After Effects - Manual (Page 13)

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The Project, Timeline, and Render Queue panels contain columns.
To show or hide columns, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) a column heading (or choose Columns from the panel menu), and
select the columns that you want to show or hide. A check mark indicates that the column is shown.
In general, the search and filter functions in the Project and Timeline panels only operate on the content of columns that are shown.
To reorder columns, select a column name and drag it to a new location.
To resize columns, drag the bar next to a column name. Some columns cannot be resized.
To sort footage items in the Project panel, click the column heading. Click once more to sort them in reverse order.
Search and filter in the Timeline, Project, and Effects & Presets panels
The Project, Timeline, and Effects & Presets panels each contain search fields that you can use to filter items in the panel.
To place the insertion point in a search field, click in the search field.
To place the insertion point in the search field for the active panel, choose File > Find or press Ctrl+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac OS).
To clear the search field, click the button that appears to the right of the text in the search field.
When you type in the search field, the list of items in the panel is filtered, showing some items and hiding others. Only items with entries that
match the search query that you’ve typed are shown. The folders, layers, categories, or property groups that contain the matched items are also
shown, to provide context.
In general, only text in columns that are shown is searched for this filtering operation. For example, you may need to show the Comments column
to search and filter by the contents of comments. (See
Columns .)
If one or more layers are selected in a composition, the filtering operation in the Timeline panel only affects selected layers. In this case,
unselected layers are not filtered out (hidden) if they don’t match the search query. However, if no layers are selected in the composition, the
filtering operation applies to all layers in the composition. This behavior matches that for showing and hiding of layer properties by pressing their
property shortcut keys. (See Show or hide properties in the Timeline panel.)
Clearing the search field and ending the search causes expanded folders and property groups to collapse (close). Therefore, it’s easier to work
with the items that are found by the filter operation if you operate on them before you clear the search field and end the search.
If the text that you type in the search field in the Project or Timeline panel contains spaces, the spaces are treated as and-based operators. For
example, typing dark solid matches footage items or layers named Dark Red Solid and Dark Gray Solid. In the Effects & Presets panel, spaces
are treated as space characters in the search field. For example, typing change color matches the Change Color effect, but not the Change To
Color effect.
Project, Timeline, and Effects & Presets panels accept or-based searching. In an or-based search, a comma denotes an or, with and-based
operators taking precedence over or-based ones. For example, sometimes the name of the property that determines the amount for a blur effect is
Amount , sometimes it is Blurriness, and sometimes it is Blur Radius. If you search for Amount, Blurriness, Radius, then you will see the
equivalent values for all of your blur effects.
When you type in a search field, recent search strings that match your input appear.
This search method also allows a way to save items you use often via a menu that opens when you click the search icon in the search field. The
search menu consists of two lists, separated by a divider. The top list contains the six most recent searches, with the most recent one at the top.
The bottom list contains saved search items. As you type, the top list filters to show matching terms.
To save a search item, Shift-click it in the top list of the search menu. Up to ten items may be saved.
To delete a saved search item from either list, hover the mouse over the the item to highlight it, and then press Delete or Backspace.
See this video on the Video2Brain website to learn about the new features for searching and filtering in panels.
Examples of searches in the Project panel
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