From Adobe Illustrator to After Effects in 60 seconds

With this workflow you can animate any image (even if it is not in vector format) in Adobe After Effects 2019. The trick is to segment the image in Adobe Illustrator, move each segment into a different layer, and then import the Illustrator file into After Effects. This is a quick tutorial for my team, if you have questions please let me know.

Here are the steps:

• In illustrator, create a new document with the resolution of the video you want to make (1080p for example)
• Import the image containing the logo
• If you do not have a vector file you’ll need to trace the image
• Go to Image trace, high fidelity photo, then click on expand
• This works best if you have a high resolution image. You might need to change the image trace settings depending on the logo you have.
• Right click on the image and ungroup
• With the direct selection tool do some adjustments
• For example get rid of the backgrounds in the Os. Select the outer and inner circles and click ‘Minus Front’. Do the same for the other Os.
• Now move all the elements to separate layers.
• Right Click on Layer 1, release to layers (sequence), and rename the layers
• Save the file
• Open After Effects, go to file, import, file, import as composition (retain layer sizes)
• The file will be imported as a composition and the layers with the filenames will be preserved
• I’ll just do some quick animation with the help of Motion 2 (https://www.mtmograph.com/motion)
• The same workflow applies even if you design your logo from scratch in illustrator.