While creating, it's important to know that your AE project is as valuable as the renders. When your video is selected, the project is opened by an in-house mographer to make any required changes, and later on formats, languages and iterations.
This means it's super important to make your file as user-friendly as possible.
Here are a few things you can do:
Minimise your layers, be smart (don't use many alpha if you can set matte)
Cut layers where they start and end. If they fade in and out for example, we do not want layers that last the entire duration of the comp for no reason! ✂️
Always give your precomps friendly names (Animated_Logo rather than Precomp3) 🤓
Put precomps in the right folders: There's a Precomps folder for each video in your AE file. 🗂
Colour coordinate your layers to make them easier to understand. 🌈
Label any masking layers as MASK and change the colour 🎭
Never scale text up using scale keyframes (use text size) 🔤
Animate text using the text animator tools rather than duplicating and masking
When parenting, be smart and create an easy master null, or try to tie it all up to the same source.
Work in a non-destructive way, for example if you want text to be mask behind someone, mask the person to on top of the text, don't mask text as if it needs to be edited we will have to do it again