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mikaelo31537811
Participant
March 16, 2018
Question

Animate a inDesign layout

  • March 16, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 29463 views

What is the best way to animate a design I have made in indesign? After Effects doesn't seem to let me import a indesign-file into after effects.

3 replies

Participant
April 1, 2021

Not sure if this will help you but I came across your thread when looking up how to try and do this. I loaded in the base image file into AE and locked the layer. I then made a text box and proceeded to copy the text from ID into that text box. Now you will need to create separate text boxes for all of the text blocks but you will be able to animate them. Hope that helps. A bit time consuming but will work. Also, if the copy changes, you can just copy and paste the new copy and it will still have all of the animations on it.

Participant
February 3, 2022

I am also searching for a good answer to the question posed in the thread above. It seems recreating the design natively in AE with the design links from an ID package may be the way to go, although perhaps time consuming. 😞

paragonmedia
Inspiring
March 2, 2021

Hi

I just started using AE and wanted to put an InDesign file in. Definitely the easiest way is to export as suitable image file. Then later edits to the InDesign file can be re-exported and the previous image overwritten.

As a novice that's what I've found

Participant
March 23, 2021

Thanks!! I'm using this right now. Newbie design student, decided at the last minute to animate my project. You saved me a headache. 

Mylenium
Legend
March 16, 2018

There's nothing to animate. They are completely different things. At best you could export a PDF from ID, open it in Illustrator, hoping that somehow magically objects will come in separate plus you find ways to separate the rest in AI int osomething usable, then import the AI file into AE. everything else will require to rebuild stuff natively in AE because in the end what you attempt to do is a rubbish workflow to begin with - if you always planned to animate this, you essentially have wasted your time be even involving ID.

Mylenium

Participant
December 7, 2018

What about when graphic designers design print material for years in ID and then the company hires a motion graphics artist who wants to animate those files?

Adobe could create a better workflow.

Your a**hole answer isn't helping anyone. Maybe just don't comment if you aren't going to be any help.

Participant
August 5, 2019

AI type does not give you live type layers in After Effects. A Photoshop file does. Maybe you should experiment with a modified workflow.

The other option is to just create outlines from all text layers and just do the copy changes in AI.

Either way, I would be charging somebody for every copy change. There is no reason that an organization cannot be more organized. Even if it is just inter-office billing, when they change the copy it costs them money. That will save you more production time than anything else.

Another option is to send a memo to the boss every time there is a copy change after you have animated a project and tell the boss that you will need at least the 80% of the time it took to animate the original project to make the changes so other projects will have to go on hold if you are going to make the deadline. You can't let one department dominate your time just because they didn't get the copy approved before you had to do your part of the project.


Like I said Rick, in a perfect world. It can hardly be helped when you're trying to assemble and pitch an ad campaign but if I could copy and paste text directly from inDesign to After Effects (and whole blocks of text at a time rather than line by line!) it would be very convenient. I'm making eyebrows at you, Adobe!