A few years ago I ran into trouble with a big project, and discovered the cause was using PSDs in After Effects.  Todd gave some great insight into the problem and basically said that in order to maximise compatibility, After Effects uses the Photoshop library in a way that can cause memory issues (this is all on this list, about 4 years ago).  

Because of that, I have gotten into the habit of always converting PSDs into individual layers and saving them out as Tiff files.  I've been doing that for years and it has saved me loads of grief.  Even the project I'm working on now has a bunch of Photoshop assets created by artists at very large sizes (some over 11K).  On machines with less than 16gb ram After Effects sometimes slows to a crawl and has all sorts of problems with them.  Save them out as individual Tiffs and everything works much, much faster.

It's a different scenario to you, and I'm not suggesting that we have the same problems, but basically I try to avoid using PSDs where possible.  For me it's pre-rendered TIFFs all the way...


-Chris


On 02/03/2014, at 10:31 AM, scott.aelist <scott.aelist@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm frustrated with the amount of redundant file prep i'm having to do on a current job and I'm wondering if there's a faster way. I'm tasked with animating some little vignettes for a travel show.
A friend is illustrating the shot in photoshop and then i have to animate from the PSD. Ideally I would just import the PSD into AE and go, but I can't. A lot of the assets are vector objects so I end up opening EVERY SINGLE smart vector object in AI and then I have to save all these layers out as AI files. I thought maybe I could import the PSD into AE and convert it to shape layers or an AI file there, but no dice. I should also mention that I have to scale up all these vector assets 200% because sometimes I need layers larger than they appear in the PSD, and if I use continually rasterize it often screws up any effects or puppeting I have on my layer. This takes an enormous amount of time and my client doesn't understand why I can't turn these things out in a day or two, and I have to make these dubious-sounding excuses of how I have to 'prepare' all these assets for animation. Is there a faster way? And am I the only one who scales up all their AI assets before bringing into AE?

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