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S01200
Known Participant
February 20, 2024
Question

Seamless workflow in Studio collaborative environment : Integrating New Photoshop Layers in After Ef

  • February 20, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 497 views

As a designer collaborating with animators in collaborative environments, I frequently find myself navigating between Photoshop and After Effects. While I'm aware of methods to reflect existing Photoshop layers in After Effects, seamlessly integrating newly added layers poses a challenge.

Illustrator/After Effects workflow is much easier for adding new layers using Overlord


.

How do studio folks and those who work in collaborative environments handle the back-and-forth workflow between Photoshop and After Effects, especially when integrating newly added layers? 




Thanks for your advice in advance

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1 reply

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
February 20, 2024

The basic answer is you don't handle anything and the bad guy is Photoshop since the layer structure of a PSD is not persistent. Pretty much the same issue as with Illustrator, only that no one has bothered to do anything about it and the copy & paste tricks Overlord employs won't work, anyway. Outside that assessment of the situation it's simply down to using the Consolidate function a lot, naming the PSD layers sensibly and explicitly so AE doesn't get confused when there are duplicate names and if possible splicing and stripping down PSDs so importing from a reduced document is more straightforward. Otherwise it's just one of those other mysteries that have been unresolved for 25 years. There just isn't a good way to go about it no matter how you skin it...

 

Mylenium

S
S01200Author
Known Participant
February 20, 2024

I see. Thanks a lot Mylenium. One workaround I've thought of is to add empty layers to the Photoshop (PSD) file before importing it into After Effects, just in case. These empty layers act as placeholders, making it simple to add new elements or content directly within After Effects without re-importing the entire PSD file. What do you think?

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
February 20, 2024

You have to keep in mind that PS allows a lot of stuff to be off canvas or "invisible". A single stray pixel from a selection in a layer mask could bust up your plans. Also things like layer styles would have to be applied to the placeholders already since AE wouldn't update that stuff as well if you want to keep it editable. Similar considerations would have to be made for adjustment layers, text layers, vector paths or per layer LUTs as well as all this grouping stuff. You have to be super careful what you use and how you use it and at the end of the day this may only increase work load in PS to clean up documents. It's not impossible, but personally I probably would only use it for the final step when the basic design has been signed off and only the busy work is left like cleaning up cutouts or inserting more motives, duplicating text layers, merging backgrounds.

 

Mylenium 

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