My file is too big. Painfully slow to do anything on AE. What are my options?

[norvi86]

Hey guys!

I´ve recently made a logo which I´m trying to animate. I made a pattern which is basically a circle made with small dots. When I transferred it to AE from Illustrator...I had a list of 1800+ dots in total. You can imagine how slow things are. What are my options to make this workable? I thought about grouping the dots better in Illustrator so technically in the end I would only have 9 groups (9 circles made with dots). What other possibilities do I have?

[Mylenium]

First, start by thinking whether you actually need access to each individual dot and whether you therefore actually need to convert it to individual layers/ shape layers. That's a general misunderstanding most people have. Doing this is optional. AE will work just fine with AI layers. And that's the point. No, don't just arbitrarily group objects in AI, organize your artwork into layers using the respective layers panel in AI. For the points you need to animate also a lot of other techniques may be usable like re-creating them with text layers using dingbats, particle grids or what have you, but advising on specifics would require to see the logo. In any case, it may not be a smart approach to hang on to your AI file too much, when it could be more efficiently re-created for animation in AE.

Mylenium