• Adobe After Effects

  Replacing an Illustrator Comp with a Different ai. file

  Posted by Sam Yost on June 15, 2016 at 12:31 am

  Please someone help me out here; I’m at the end of my rope on this and am on a bit of a deadline :-/

  I am doing an animation project that reuses a lot of footage and comps from a previous video, so I saved a duplicate AEP file, deleted the stuff that wasn’t in common, and am adding the new footage to the duplicate file.
  The problem is, that for reasons of organization I need to update the layer files (which are stored in one folder on our server) with identical files (which are stored in another folder for the new project on our server). I will then re-link all the old footage/comps with the new files. Don’t ask why…it just has to be like that 😛
  These comps are set up as a multi-layer .ai files that I imported as compositions. I have been trying to replace them with the new file and have the following problems:

  Replace the source of the composition in the project panel with the new file: The “replace” option is greyed out.

  Import the new comp into the project panel, alt drag on top of the old comp in the timeline: It deletes all my keyframes and I lose all the animations I’ve done.

  Open up the old comp and alt-drag the layers individually from the files in the “New Comp Layers” folder in the project panel onto the old layers in comp timeline: Grab bag of weirditude, from importing all screwy to getting “source file not found” messages to just duplicating the layers and not replacing them.

  Thanks in advance!

  Joe Clay replied 10 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Joe Clay

  June 15, 2016 at 3:56 pm

  Replacing compositions is a little difficult, but what I’d do is make sure the old items become unlinked. So temporarily save your aep where it can’t find the original files. Then if you replace one layer of one of the comps, it’ll find all the new ones and relink. Then you can save the project wherever and it’ll maintain the links to the new files.

  Alternatively—and it seems like it’d be a lot easier for you—you could just collect the files to your new folder.
  https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/basics-rendering-exporting.html#collect_files_in_one_location

  I hope this helps!

  Joe Clay
  Workbench.tv

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