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atpdx
Participant
March 16, 2023
Open for Voting

Easy Import Photoshop and Illustrator Layers

  • March 16, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 255 views

How about a simple, non-cumbersome, and realistic way to import .ai and .psd layers onto your After Effects timeline. I personaly feel like the whole "Import as Footage/Retain Layer Sizes etc." system is convoluted, old, and never ends up behaving as planned. How about one button that allows you to pull in whatever you currenty have open in illustrator? All the layers based on the grouping you have them in in Illustrator and Photoshop. There's already several plugins that do this but they break when the progam is updated but the cool thing is, Adobe owns all three of these programs so it'd bee really easy to get this off the ground. 

2 replies

A
atpdxAuthor
Participant
January 31, 2025

The file or layers you wanted to to open in AE would only be effected by AE.  Because that makes the most sense right? You could add expressions to it yes! You could do a lot of things to it. There's a plugin called Overloard that does exactly what I'm suggesting that has been sold thousands of  times so obviously theres a group of people out there that also think this is a pretty convuluted workflow and are opting for something different. 

Shebbe
Community Expert
ShebbeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 16, 2023

Could you elaborate on how this would be an improvement? There's no difference in pulling the file in while it's open or separately through the import dialog. You'd still have to prefer retain layer size or take document size. And what would/should happen when you change the contents of the 'live' file? What happens to the layers in AE when stuff is already done to it and they're moved around? Renamed? Expressions? New layers added? Removed?

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