Animate to After Effects workflow

Import Animate documents directly into Adobe After Effects to enhance your animations. Add animations to After Effects quickly and easily while maintaining your Animate timeline structure and organization.

Published August 10, 2023

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00:01

Introduction

One of the best things about the Adobe Creative Suite is the compatibility between applications.

And now, we can introduce to you a direct workflow between Adobe Animate and After Effects.

00:13

Preparing an Animate project for After Effects

So here in this Adobe Animate document, I have a very short 4 to 5-second-long animation.

It was all hand-drawn with the Paint Brush Tool using a video track as reference, otherwise known as rotoscoping.

But I want to give this animation a little bit more of a hand-drawn feel or apply some sort of effect to it or a different effects.

Effects that go beyond a vector-based animation program.

So, the dancer is on her own layer, and the other three layers are just some additional effects that I have added in.

With my Animate documents saved, I'm now going to switch over to After Effects.

00:48

Importing Animate files into After Effects

And so now, I'm in After Effects and with the new After Effects project, I'm going to go to File, Import, and I'm going to select my Animate Dancer.fla document.

So, for Import Preferences, you can choose the same folder or a different folder, and if there's audio present in your Animate document, you can check this box.

I will not, since I do not have any audio with my animation, and then click OK.

And so now, you'll notice in After Effects, in your Project window, we now have a folder called Dancer.

If we expand that, you'll see that each of these layers has been converted to a swift file.

And now we have a new composition created called Dancer.

And if we double click it, we can play the Timeline to see our animation take place.

And now our After Effects Timeline is set up exactly

01:32

Working with imported layers in After Effects

as our Animate document.

All the layers are there intact and we can play our Timeline to see the animation play.

I'm going to import a background that I created using Photoshop.

01:42

Enhancing animation with backgrounds and effects

I'm going to place that on a layer behind my dancer.

And now since I have the freedom of these assets all in different layers, I can apply various effects to them.

So, at this point, you're only limited by your own imagination.

You can add various effects and styles and generate any kind of effect you want because after all, this is After Effects.

So, I just wanted to show you the ease and convenience of an Adobe Animate to After Effects workflow.

So, here I'm using effects in After Effects to give my animation or my brushstrokes that I created originally in Animate more of a real media feel.

This was a quick and relatively simple example, but it shows the limitless possibilities of the workflow we now have between Adobe Animate and After Effects.

What you learned:

Add interactivity between Animate and After Effects by dragging and dropping an Animate authoring file (FLA) into an After Effects project
See how layers from Animate are added in the right order automatically
Explore how to import audio into animations

Presenter: Chris Georgenes

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Cookies are small text files stored by your web browser when you use websites. There are also other technologies that can be used for similar purposes like HTML5 Local Storage, web beacons, and embedded scripts. These technologies help us do things like remembering you and your preferences when you return to our sites, measure how you use the website, conduct market research, and gather information about the ads you see and interact with.

If enabled:

We can improve your experience by tailoring the site and the content to things we think might be of interest
We can better keep track of your preferences — like what language you prefer to use
We will better understand your likely interests so we can provide you more relevant Adobe ads and content on non-Adobe websites and in non-Adobe apps
It will help us improve the performance of our website and those of our partners who use the Adobe Experience Cloud

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We’ll still count your use of our site and services
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