How to import Adobe Illustrator Vectors into After Effects

let me know if this situation sounds familiar you're nearing the end of a video project and the client reaches out and says hey can we put our logo at the beginning and end of the video so they give you a ApS or illustrator file and you want to take this up further you want to animate that logo in after-effects what's the easiest way to do that and what's the most efficient way to get your files from illustrator to after-effects don't forget to subscribe and let's get right into it to show you what I mean I'm gonna pull this temp title into After Effects and this is a EPS file if you were just pull it into After Effects like it's in square there's not really much that you can do with this if you just wanted to scale and move it into place and you could hit the little star button and hey look it looks nice but you can't manipulate specific layers of this design that's not what we want to do what I am going to do is open this file up in Illustrator let's say you've gotten something like this from the client you get a whole bunch of variations of their logo and I just want to do this top left version of their logo inside illustrator everything is made up of groups and layers and paths so in order to work with different parts of a logo within After Effects you're gonna have to group them together and move them to the highest point in the hierarchy in this layers window so we're gonna be creating different layers for this top left logo this is the one that I want to go with right off the bat I know that with this eye button alright I don't need that bottom one that's this bottom left one and I'm assuming that's the top right so all of these I know I don't want highlight and hit the trashcan I've deleted them the next step may not be necessary but it makes everything go a little bit smoother as you import into After Effects that's to create a new file with the boundaries of sixteen by nine so I'm gonna go to file new and up here they've been really awesome to give you presets so I would say most people do animations now in 1920 by 1080 I'm actually gonna do 4k because that that's just I think future is going to 4k so 3840 by 2160 so I get a blank canvas here we can go back to this highest layer here I'm going to hit this little circle button that makes sure that all of my elements are highlighted I'm gonna hit command C then I'm gonna go over to my blank canvas the sixteen by nine for K hit command V at this point I'm gonna start creating layers that are groups of elements that I want to animate within After Effects there's the word art there's the word design there's this phrase your text here and I'm just gonna treat this whole circle as one element and the background with that in mind let's go ahead and find these things it looks like these groups are the different words that I need art design and your text here for all the words you can see that each letter gets its own compound path so I can highlight this group and I'm gonna go up to these three little bars right here and do collect a new layer label this layer your text here and move that layer up top now that's its own layer your text here is its own layer now we're going to repeat this step for the rest of my elements I click this little circle right here and I can see that that's just the word design I can click this right here and do collect a new layer move that layer up double click and hit design this is the word art another way to do this would be to go down to the bottom right here and this little icon is create new layer now you can just click and drag just the word art into there now type in art whichever way is faster its next one I'm going to take this path right here and put it in there and I'm just gonna call this background and move that to the bottom now this is the last layer that I have and I'm going to call this one circle because it's a circle around all of the text right there I'm going to zoom out by hitting command - right now I'm taking the background layer and fitting it to my 16 by 9 next highlight all of these hit the circles on the rest of my elements zoom in just a little bit hold option and shift or alt and shift if you're on Windows at the same time get right into the center like such now we're left with your text here design art circle background 5 different layers and if I want to animate each one it's in its own way we're going to be able to do that inside after effects file save as art design your text here save it wherever you want to save it as an illustrator file now that I'm inside After Effects and I'm gonna right-click inside this part right here go import file in another big key here is you don't want to import it just as footage you want to import it as retain layer sizes and I'll show you why right now so composition retain layer sizes now we have the composition and if you look right here you have your text here by uh 9-ball that design art circle and background I have all of these available to manipulate the reason why I want to retain layer sizes is because now all of the anchor points for every single one of these assets is centered to the element itself so notice how art the Anchor Point is right here in the middle of art as opposed to if the Anchor Point was right here in the middle of the frame it's a lot easier to animate these when your layers within After Effects already have their anchor points centered so that's why you want to retain layer sizes if you want to just leave it right here and animate as you would one thing I would recommend is if you scale anything so if I were to take this and scale it and make it really big notice how it's getting really pixelated and not to cool all you have to do is hit this little sunburst checkmark and that will now rasterize all of your files so it will keep everything really crisp whether you blow it up really huge or make it really small that is the key to illustrator or these dot eps files is that it retains the resolution no matter how big you make the file but let's say you want to take this a step further and turn these into shape layers because you really know how to manipulate shapes within After Effects if you hold shift highlight everything right click go to create create shapes from vector layer now all of these have been turned into shapes which you can manipulate way more with in After Effects with different effects and presets and things of that nature one hot tip if you don't want to sit here and click all of these and delete all of your illustrator files all you have to do is click and highlight once all of them are highlighted and move it just a little bit so it moves your ones to the top and then highlight all of the illustrator files on the bottom hit delete and you are off to the races to animate your vector logo from illustrator in After Effects if you found this video helpful and you know another editor that may benefit from this knowledge all I ask is that you refer me to a friend until next time I hope you guys are out there crushing those edits and living a life of abundance I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Javier Mercedes

Views: 47,777

Keywords: how to prepare and import an illustrator file into after effects, working from illustrator to after effects, how to save your adobe illustrator file for import into after effects, illustrator to after effects, after effects retain layer sizes, ai to ae layers, ai to ae workflow, import ai to ae, elias sarantopoulos, illustrator to after effects layers, how to import illustrator files into after effects with layers, how to take adobe illustrator vectors into after effects

Id: 3Z9L0I7te8Q

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019