Im a Newbie so be easy on me.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I don’t think you can merge and replace the existing ai file. You can use file>merge to bring in the changed spline(s) but you’ll have to manually replace the one you previously brought in.

[Brett Triantafillou]

Thats what I was afraid of. Its not like after effects where it references the file. So updating the file is not a problem. Maybe thats something that should be changed. Thanks

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I should have mentioned something else. If you know that you’re going to be making changes to your ai file but you want to still work with it in Cinema, you can use Cinema’s Xref object to provide automatic updates.

Basically you would do this:

* import your ai file into Cinema and then save that scene — let’s call it AI_Scene;

* open a new scene in Cinema and create an Objects>Scene>Xref object;

* in the Xref’s properties, enter AI_Scene as the Filename (or navigate to the file location);

* now you can work with the Xref as if it’s the actual illustrator spline;

* if you change the file in ai, save it, merge it into AI_Scene, and delete the original ai spline;

* now, when you go back to the working scene, Cinema will automatically update the spline.

Caveat: In order for this to work, you need to keep the spline position consistent in AE and in AI_Scene, i.e., don’t move/rotate/scale the imported spline(s) after you’ve imported them into AI_Scene. Or, if you zero out the position of the ai spline in AI_Scene, you have to do that for each subsequent ai file you import to maintain the same offset in the Xref.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

See my follow-up post, above.

[Brett Triantafillou]

That makes sense so basically I will have to delete and re merge the AI file into a scene but by using the Xref object I dont have to worry about messing up my actual scene. In a way it works as layers. I got it thank you very much. This is very good information.

Cheers!

Brett