Resizing of Ai artboard and now re-positioning issues

[star_space]

Originally my workflow was to create shapes from outlines and then animate, but for this last project I animated using the Ai (dynamic linked) layers and went on to make time-consuming mistakes, one after another.

For one, you cannot have more than one artboard in Ai. You also cannot change the positioning of the objects on that artboard, and finally you cannot resize artboards to fit one last thing. That is, without making big positional changes in your Ae projects.

After making my artboard around 400px taller to house something last minute, I noticed all of my animations were repositioned downward and out of frame. I guess I should have just created a new Illustrator file as opposed to trying to fit so much on the artboard.

So I backtracked and tried to resize the artboard to be it's original size, saved, quit and reopened both apps. Unfortunately nothing changed. In After Effects, I precomped the layers to reposition the animation to be in-frame (and to not mess with the current keyframing). But when I repositioned, the pixels that were not originally in-frame were just missing. The vectors were essentially cut in half, so repositioning them made no difference. 

None of the auto-saves files are useful since they all have the linked layers. And since I closed Illustrator, it seems that I'm not able to 'Revert' to a previous version or 'undo.' Additionally my Illustrator Version History is grayed out.

Also, am I wrong or is there no Illustrator autosave files saved to your local drive like with After Effects?

How should I go about fixing my animations?

Is it better to unlink the Ai layers and work from a copy? Is there a way to do this without 'create[ing] shapes from outlines' (if indeed this is the wrong way to handle this)? Sorry for such a long post and thank you

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

If you resize an artboard in Illustrator and the file has been imported as a composition retaining layer size, the position of everything will change relative to the comp. By far, the easiest way to reposition everything is to add a null, parent every layer to the new null, then move the null. If you remember the change in the Artboard size, you can calculate the movement of the repositioning null.

Unless you are animating vector paths, using vector paths as motion paths, or using Shape Layer animators, there is absolutely no advantage to converting vector layers to shape layers. Render time can go up significantly, and a long list of helpful illustrator design tools and brushes will be converted to simplified gray-filled shapes in complex groups.

[star_space]

Thank you for your response. The null re-positioning worked like a charm. Also appreciate you clearing up what I've always wondered about Shape Layers.