Comp management

Self taught in AE, and have drastically improved my comp management in the last few years. When I think of what I used to do manually….

Anyway, one thing I am running into is issues with managing nested comps, in a couple of scenarios.

Context: most videos are for digital products, so animated UI, sometimes set within a phone or laptop, etc. So, for example in a video that shows an animated graph on a dashboard within a laptop in pseudo-3d, from the bottom up, I might have:

• animated graph comp in…
• dashboard comp in…
• laptop comp in…
• scene comp with camera in…
• the main comp

My issue is that if I want to reuse that scene comp, I manually dupe it, then need to dupe all the nested comps and replace.

Should that be manual?

Also, a client asked for another version of the video in 1080x1920. This time I just copied the AE file and manually changed the comps to 9:16, and moved things that needed to be moved. That saved a lot of time duplicating every comp and adjusting, but now I have two AE files and if the client later asks for updates I gotta do them twice.

Maybe that’s just life, but it feels like there could be a better way? Maybe some work or consideration at the beginning of the project to ease the workload at the end?

Would be interested in hearing about other users’ workflows/experiences

Thanks!