[Christopher Cook]

This response is obviously not timely, but I’ll leave my findings here since this thread came up when searching for help on this topic.

I have been experiencing this same issue with more and more frequency over the past few months – that of having layered Illustrator files* importing fine, working with them without abnormality, and then having to pull my hair out because they simply aren’t there in any outputs.

When I first experienced it, these elements would function normally in RAM preview, making it doubly confusing that they would be visible and functioning when scrubbing the timeline and when previewing, but then not exist when rendering.

As the months have progressed, and as was occurring today, the files have frequently been electing to opt out of the Preview renders as well, presumably because they’re catching up on their Hulu queue and can’t be bothered just at that moment. Perplexing.

These files are RGB. They are not Guides. They are stored locally. Purging, reloading, restarting, refreshing, et cetera has no effect.

To speak to my own non-dunce-ity, I worked on semi-large project each in November, December, and January that were comprised almost entirely of characters and elements layered out in Illustrator, imported as Compositions into After Effects, and animated without issues of elements not rendering. In March I began experiencing these issues.

Aside from trying it dozens of times in the hope that one will catch, the only solution I’ve found is to just not use AI files. This is certainly not ideal, but neither is not having a product to show the client. Exporting each layer individuals as EPS out of Illustrator and importing these into After Effects has proven it to cause no issues at all.

The major impairment with this work around is that you would have to re-align all of your layered elements within AE.

What I did, since I had already imported the AI as a composition, which imports it in separate layers and retains the layers’ sizes (this is the default – don’t select “Document Size for this work-around)…what I did was to import the EPS’s of the individual layers and then replace the AI file layers with the EPS of the corresponding layer…if that makes sense.

That saved me from having to reanimate and anchor and adjust the whole thing a second time. Not ideal as the AI working, but it worked.

So, bottom line, go EPS. Use that handy “Export As” option.

That is, at least, what worked for me. I honestly suspect it’s an odd bug. Wasn’t an issue 6 months ago, but now is an issue. I’m due to reformat the machine but am just (luckily) too busy to drop a day. I’ll try to remember to update my findings once I do reformat and reload everything anew.

Working on PC Win7 6-core i7 3.33Ghz 12-GB DDR3 CS5 Production

Best of luck to all until then.

Christopher Cook
Brainroot Light and Sound

*no experience with this happening with PSDs, but I haven’t worked with complex PSDs