Illustrator Graphics for Premiere?

[Tim Kolb]

First off…I’m not sure if saving an illustrator CS5 file might be causing you some pain in PPro CS3…which is in yout sig.

Since Illustrator CS5 didn’t exist when PPro CS3 was written, there may be aspects of that file that are unrecognized by PPro CS3.

Secondly, to my knowledge, I don’t think that PPro sees a “canvas” in an Illustrator file like you’d have with a Photoshop doc. The logo is brought in and rasterized at the size you’ve created it, and cropped to the content. You just have to position it…or build the layers of the lower third by bringing the illustrator element into Photoshop and creating a PSD.

One thing…PPro only rasterizes a vector graphic once…on import. It’s not like AE which will continuously re-rasterize as you scale the logo up/down, so you want to usually bring a vector graphic in at the largest size you’ll need it so you don’t have to scale it up in bitmap.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Curt Pair]

Tim,

I was lost there for a minute! I was like “CS3?” Where the heck did he get that? Then I realized it’s in my signature!

So, I guess I need to fix that…

Anyway, I’m talking about CS5 all the way through now!

I’ve been pulling my hair out for over a year on this! It was driving me crazy! I’ve searched all over the net, forums, you name it. No answers.

Today, wouldn’t you know it, an hour after my post, I found the answer! I somehow stumbled upon a older “Lynda.com” link from an Adobe forum for CS3…

You can import an Adobe Illustrator still-image file directly into a Premiere Pro project. Premiere Pro converts path-based Illustrator art into the pixel-based image format used by Premiere Pro, a process known as rasterization. Premiere Pro automatically anti-aliases, or smooths, edges of the Illustrator art. Premiere Pro also converts all empty areas into an alpha channel, so that empty areas become transparent.

If you want to define the dimensions of the Illustrator art when it is rasterized, use Illustrator to set crop marks in the Illustrator file. For information about setting crop marks, see Illustrator Help.

So now you need to make your selection in Illustrator, go to “object” then “make crop marks” and then enlarge the crop mark selection to the full-frame size of your video/preset. After that, go to “effects” and then use the crop mark selection there. Save the file.

Open Premiere, import and VIOLA! The entire ‘graphic’ as designed in Illustrator appears! It’s ready to lay down on the time-line, all good to go, no further adjustments need to be made.

This was a long tedious process to find the answer. Perhaps I gave up too quickly before, just needing to continue working. Today, I was tenacious about finding the answer once and for all!

Thanks for your help Tim.

Curt Pair
Picture This Productions
Sony ICE Team
F900/F800/F350/PDW700/EX1/EX3/D790/D600
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 HD/Matrox
Phoenix, AZ

[Tom Gomez]

One thing that works for me… if the illustrator file is too small and throw it on to your Premiere timeline and it looks cruddy, just go up to clip/video options and select “scale to frame size.” Then Premiere will rasterize it huge, and you can just scale down to what you want and it will look dynamite.

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[Jon Merrifield]

I know it’s a few years later but your post was exactly the info I was looking for today as I have not been a huge user of AI files. Cheers.
-Jon

Jon Merrifield
PELi VFX