a request for After Effects Sports Template authors

Envato Authors Video Authors
1

(I’m not an author, so I don’t know if I should be posting this here. But it IS a request TO authors)

I do high school sports webcasts at 2 different schools, and use various AE templates for bringing up stat overlays for various players during the game.

The problem is that AE isn’t the greatest for entering stat data. Some comps are for a single player, with just a handful of stats. Those aren’t too bad to work with. But other useful templates have many stats for many players all in one comp. These take forever to enter the stats and to get the data reasonably lined up (I had one template that had over 100 separate text entries for a stat table).

So, my question/request would be this: Why not include the optional capability of putting the data in a single Illustrator file? I’m not that adept at either AE or Illustrator, but in a few cases I’ve managed to get something set up that is way more efficient than doing many separate entries in AE. I realize not everyone who uses AE uses (or owns) Illustrator, so the author would have to include both options, but adding an Illustrator choice wouldn’t add that much to the authoring schedule, would it?

Using an Illustrator file wouldn’t have nearly the motion customization that you can get with individual text entries, but for those comps with a lot of stats, the trade-off would be worth it.

2

Maybe you can just import your AI file to AE project placeholder instead of photo/video?

3

The graphics inside of After Effects can be exported as motionless still images (in any format, such as .PSD, .PNG, .JPG, etc), and then converted for use however you need.

Keep in mind that After Effects cannot export vector images such as .EPS or .AI. If Illustrator is your intended application, I’d recommend exporting a .PSD file and using it inside of Illustrator.

4

I’ll try exporting the graphics next time. I’ve never done that before – do you mean that all the individual elements will go in to Photoshop as separate layers that can then be brought back in to AE with all the layers being animated?

As I have been doing it so far, just bringing in my text from an AI file doesn’t match up with the animation that is sometimes done element-by-element in AE.