Transcript:
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 layer’s 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. It’s 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.