For those that might not be aware of these two workarounds:
Illustrator can write to editable PS text layers if we use File > Export As... > Photoshop PSD. The resulting PSD file can then be imported into AE and those PS text layers can be converted to AE text. (If that feels like a bunch of extra steps, it is a few clicks.)
Or,
We can copy and paste the content of an Illustrator text object to the content of an AE text layer. This should maintain the font, the fill, and the stroke. Just be sure to have selected all the text (don't copy and paste just the text object from AI). Of course, important things like placement in the frame are not maintained.
Again, the years fly by without so much as an acknowledgment from Adobe much less implementation. Can't even express how much this would make a HUGE difference in our workflow.
I do love going back into these threads and seeing my past self begging for scraps. Very thankful for all the changes being made to After Effects, but I would so love for this to be acknowledged as I continue to have to copy and paste from Illustrator to get live text in After Effects. I'm not using the Photoshop hack, it's ridiculous that we can import live text from a rasterized file but not an intrinsically similar vector file. Come on Adobe.
Honestly, you'd think that Adobe would, at the very least, want all their toys to play nicely with one another. This is so beyond basic, so beyond essential workflow that I cannot fathom why Adobe can't just make this happen. Stop making us buy 3rd party plugins to allow apps in your own universe to coexist.
Regarding "it's ridiculous that we can import live text from a rasterized file but not an intrinsically similar vector file":
It does seem like text should just be text, right?
Early versions of After Effects didn't have Text Layers and we relied on an effect to create text. It was, simply put, dreadful. Then the After Effects team reworked the Photoshop Text Engine to work in After Effects and like magic we have text layers in After Effects that match Photoshop Text Layers with the corresponding method to "convert to editable text".
Unforutnately for those of use that create source footage for After Effects in Illustrator, Illustrator uses its own source code for Text Objects - not Photoshop's.
Yes, exactly, they aren't mind readers. They also weren't reading the UserVoice pages either, so we were basically throwing years of ideas at a wall. Years. I have been asking for this for years, and since they moved all these posts they now have the same date, so you talk like I'm just coming out of the woodwork. Thank you for the explanation, still does not excuse the lack of function nor essential interoperability in a suite that is supposed to work like a team. Find a freaking hack if you must, I don't care.
The After Effects team was 100% looking at the UserVoice request pages. I know because I've talked with them about it many times. EVERY post on there was read by a team member. There just wasn't a lot of feedback from them on there. Hopefully moving it to these forums will help facilitate better feedback.
I am reassured to know that the team read everything, but their lack of response both in the UserVoice and general boards is absolutely inexcusable. I don't need to reiterate how many years some of the top requests were completely, utterly ignored even while the community was begging just to have something tagged as under consideration. The team couldn't even muster that slight effort, so don't be surprised when we respond with scorn.
@jackthegiantslayer I can personally confirm @Szalam's assertion that we read every post on UserVoice, to our own detriment in some cases. Unfortunately, that platform worked against us in many ways that I won't detail here. It took time, but we've moved the bug reporting and feature requests here to the Adobe Community so that we can have better (actual) conversations with you about how we can improve After Effects. We acknowledge that we weren't as responsive as we would have liked to be, and moving the forums is how we are actively working to improve that.
I get your frustration, but it seems you may not be following Adobe Blogs or when feature requests go from "under consideration" to "completed".
The After Effects team has long communicated their work on improving performance. I've found being able to have a New Viewer open with a Preview running for a downstream Comp while making adjustments in an upstream Comp and see those changes update while the downstream Comp Preview is still running to be nothing short of fantastic, not to mention being able to edit parameters, nudge keyframes, trim and extend Layer times spans, and so forth while a Preview is running in the current Comp.
I appreciate both the responses and share in your hope that the combined forums will generate better communication as well as fostering consideration from both sides. I certainly have been much less cranky lately because things have been noticeably improving, both in the app and in communication from the team, particularly in the beta forum. It's amazing what a little mutual communication can serve when you have felt invisible for so long.
Now to get back to being cranky...
Warren, as for following the blog, I certainly check it out but I'm not reporting longstanding bugs or feature requests to a blog, I reported those to the very place I was instructed to by Adobe. So please stop telling me what I already know, the entire pointof what I and hundreds of other users complained about was that we didn't get a comment, much less "Under Consideration" marked, even less "Completed" on the majority of top voted requests. Please do go through the good old Uservoice page and find the requests for these features and how many years they took...oh wait, you can't anymore because they deleted the old board and all the moved comment dates are wrong. I also don't consider reintroducing features that were inexplicably removed "new features", and while I'm grateful for the new presets, I'm not going to celebrate given the 17 year wait.
You see there is a precedent for my particular brand of cranky, several years ago I was using a Retina iMac which for a variety of reasons would not cooperate with the latest version of After Effects. It took Adobe two years to fix it, even with multiple users complaining, broken promises and little communication or acknowledgement from Adobe. This was the beginning of my distrust for Adobe (although their crushing of Macromedia should have been.) To further date myself, I have been working with After Effects since 1993, professionally since 1995, so please don't color me as naive. The precedent of poor communication was not set by me.
Similar to you, I've been using After Effects daily since Cosa After Effects 1.5. While there have been various bugs and issues, I don't recall a two-year period where it didn't work on iMacs. Pre-subscription plans, I usually updated every other major release and only to .1 or .5 versions avoiding .0 releases. (I thank Trish Meyer for that advice.)
The blog is just one of many ways to hear from the After Effects team. Of course it's not a bug report forum, but didn't you mention a concern that there wasn't any communication? As I am sure you're aware, NAB, Adobe MAX, and user groups are also great opportunities to get some time with the various Adobe teams.
I do hear you. I make my living off Adobe programs, and have most of my adult life. Ultimately I am very grateful for Adobe and their tools which changed my life, and I want to express this here as I feel my complaints overshadow everything else. I honestly do not like biting the hand that feeds me. I am also self-taught, experimented with the early version of AE in college, then while making my living off graphic design began doing titles and terrible fx for indie shorts and such until I 'graduated' into NYC animation studios where I moved more into C4D/Xparticles. I mention all this basically to say that I've been around the block a few times and I've seen the best and worst of Adobe.
The two-year issue was specific to the 2015 Retina 5K iMacs and the team was well aware of it. Apple did not help things either by making this terribly fussy machine, now retired thankfully. And yes, I mentioned a concern that there wasn't any communication, because there was virtually none in the very forums that we were directed to voice our concerns and vote on feature ideas. You only have to scroll through a few of them and the various frustrated user comments to realize this. I repeatedly made the point of showing how the Premiere team was able to at least mark ideas as being considered or in progress on their own Uservoice, but we did not get the same service. Adobe has admitted this and I am hoping they make good on their promises, I'm honestly very impressed with all their latest strides.
Hi, all, I hope that I'm not beating a dead horse, but I wanted to point out that Text in Photoshop is a vector asset, within a container made for pixels and vectors, and can print beautifully on a postscript printer.
But I agree that interoperability should indeed be continue to be one of the key points of our workflow, and I hope that the engineering teams at Adobe will provide all the bricks necessary for Overlord to become a UXP plugin, in order to work natively on Apple Silicon. An Acqui-Hire would help...
In case anyone didn't see Rick Gerard's workaround posted here a while ago: editable-text-from-illustrator-to-after-effects/ you can import your Illustrator file into XD, then export as After Effects and the text is converted to editable text. Lord I wish I had seen this when it was first posted, as I've wasted countless hours copying and pasting text back and forth. After Effects Team, if XD can freaking do it, WHY NOT AFTER EFFECTS!? We have been asking for this for over a decade, and without any fanfare you add this functionality to XD? What is wrong with this picture?
Before anyone gets too excited about Illustrator text objects being converted to After Effects text layers by sending artboards from Adobe XD to After Effects, line spacing may not be maintained if the text object has multiple lines. Once in After Effects, leading may need to be reset to match Illustrator.
I'd still export to PSD with text set to editable as an interim step if this happens.
Good to know. So far so good on this end, although this recent project only had short titles, so everything translated surprisingly well. My main client designs and storyboards in Illustrator, where I have to break out upwards of 30-100 individual frames and then copy/paste all that text into After Effects as OverLord doesn't do what I need. Albeit a hack, the XD one takes a few less clicks than doing the Photoshop method and saved me SO. MUCH. TIME. Now if only we could get the Adobe team to take this request seriously for those users who have to predominantly animate Illustrator vector art.
By God if they fully kill the only useful app for bringing live text into After Effects I am going to lose my mind. I am just beyond disgusted with Adobe and how they treat their customers who learn/integrate their apps only to have the rug yanked out one more time because of their sloppy, failed attempt to monopolize. This is how I felt when they destroyed Macromedia's wonderful apps years ago. They're getting close to Google levels of app graveyard.
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