Export for Screens - After Effects unable to parse export results correctly

[greenmonkeytroy]

I've had an issue that's becoming increasingly disruptive in my pipeline.

Example:

In Illustrator, I make 100 frames for an animatic. Each frame is a sequentially named artboard.

I export as JPG's or PNG's, using Export for Screens. The images output successfully, and I am able to see them all behaving in Explorer, Bridge, etc.

As soon as I bring them in to After Effects, it appears that it can only interpret the first image in the sequence, so while the software sees and imports the images as individual files, it does not display them correctly in the timeline.

I have attempted a number of different ways to make it appear correctly, including Drag-Drop, File>Import, doing one by one, etc. Same issues, but sometimes the "Cached" image that represents the stack of frames does change. I've tried all number of import settings, to no avail. I've purged caches, tried different versions of the software, etc.

The only work around I can do is to re-save the exported images outside of Illustrator, either by creating a multi-page PDF in Acrobat and exporting JPG's from there, or loading the images into Media Encoder to re-output as JPG's. Once this is done, it fixes everything, and these new images don't care how they're imported into After Effects.

So my thinking is there's something breaking between AI and AE with the initial export, but I can't understand why AE is the only program that seems to have the issue in displaying the individual images correctly.

Anyone else experience this?

[Mylenium]

Aside from the fact that this would have been better asked in the AE forum I can only tell you that it's a known issue. From the looks of it it's some malformatted metadata that throws off AE, though the investigation appears to be ongoing, as apparently it does not affect all users. So for the time being stick to your workflow or use other image formats liek TIFF or PSD, which AE will happily accept.

Mylenium