• Adobe After Effects

  Cropping exported vector (swf) art in Flash for use in AE

  Posted by Alex Volkov on September 19, 2012 at 8:39 pm

  Hi

  I am animating using Flash and After Effects. Right now I am experimenting with animation only in AE. I am exporting seperate body parts of a character as vector.
  *.ai file format screws up the color of the artwork for some reason (anyone knows why?)
  so I decided to export my vector images merely as *.swf and it’s good – except one thing. When I export seperate parts, I copy a part, make a new Flash document, paste the part and say Export Image > SWF. But when the part is imported into AE, the distance between transform gizmos is too big and that is because I assume that I have to crop every single Flash document to be almost the exactly the same size as a specific body part in order to get rid of the huge distance of the gizmos. It’s hard selecting and generally managing bodyparts when there is a huge transparent area and gizmos so far apart from each other. Is there an easier way to export vector art? Or maybe to force AE to crop my imported vector art pieces to get rid of the transparent area?

  All suggestions are appreciated alot.

  Alex Volkov replied 13 years, 8 months ago 62,864 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Alex Volkov

  September 20, 2012 at 10:23 pm

  I’ve made a topic about this issue on different forum. Maybe it will be easier to understand by reading it also 🙂

  I make my artwork in Flash and then export the images or animation in SWF format to After Effects.
  The problem is that when I import the still images, there is alot of invisible area besides the actual image that I want to animate. As you can see here https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10484650/ae_prob.png

  I’ve selected all the parts so that you can see where the transform gizmos are – as you can see they are far away from each other with alot of invisible space inbetween them. As a result it’s hard selecting bodyparts by clicking on them directly in the Composition panel because they overlap each other in size.

  Ofcourse I can resize my Flash work area ( Modify > Document ) and set my X and Y pixels so that I get minimum area when exporting single bodyparts, but that is alot of work resizing back and forth. I am wondering if there is an easier method? I want all the invisible areas gone so that the image size of a bodypart is only of the actual visible image.

  Is there an easy way of doing it?

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