Please Support Native Illustrator ↔ After Effects Live Link (Like Overload)

We need native support for a “live link” feature—just like Battle Axe’s Overload—built right into After Effects. Imagine designing in Illustrator and having your artwork stream straight into AE in real time so you can animate without any extra steps.

It’s baffling that something this essential is still locked behind third-party plugins. Sure, you can kind of rig it today, but the Illustrator ↔ After Effects workflow is awful:

• You can only import one artboard at a time. That forces you to split every screen layout into its own .ai file.

• Illustrator files come in as single Vector layers. Unless you manually convert them to Shape layers, you can’t even move a sub-layer independently.

• Even when you do convert to Shapes, you can’t import each sub-layer as its own AE layer. Everything ends up grouped, and shortcuts like P, S, T, and U simply open the parent layer’s transforms—not the individual pieces you need.

Right now, you can’t iterate between After Effects and Illustrator: build a rough comp in AE, tweak the artwork in Illustrator, then have your revised design flow back into AE. That back-and-forth is exactly what motion artists need—but it’s impossible today.

I’m counting on Adobe’s engineering team to deliver this capability natively. Let’s bring Overload-style live linking into After Effects at last!