Illustrator and after effects workflow - versions and templates

Question

Hi all
I'm looking to take some templates from illustrator, across to ae, animate and have a master version for a template.
Is there a way I can easily copy my master AE file, and then replace all the master illustrator files within it, with the new versions for a new template, so that everything animates the same etc, but if I change some text or something, the change will come in. I will be creating a bunch of pre animated symbols that can just be dragged and dropped, adding universal colour controls and converting any text to editable to use animation presets etc. So in the main, this versioning won't matter as most of it will be done entirely in AE without a regular graphics program. HOWEVER. I want my workflow to be sensible and I don't want to end up making copies of crap or working inefficiently.
I'd normally just copy and paste a new illustrator file over the top, same name, same layers. That works ok. However with this I'm gonna need versioning etc/ or to at least know which illustrator file is different.
I DONT want this work in a way that I wouldn't have to go into my layers folder and copy and replace each layer!!
The only way that I've come up with is to keep my masters as masters. Folder them away and never touch them other than to copy them.
Copy the masters into a new titled folder. Then open up the AE proj and rename that. Now my main problem is replacing the Illustrator files. My first idea was to rename the master files. Hopefully after effects would still understand where they are and not make me replace these layers?
Then once they are renamed, bring in the template to over write them, copy and replace, and it should all be hunky dory.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about or experienced creating templates like this before?
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You seem to understand the basics here but let me make a few points just to clarify what has to happen to make your workflow efficient and keep the animations working.
You can save any After Effects project file as a template by doing a save as command from the file menu. That will get you to step one. If you created your project by importing your master Illustrator file as a composition with either option selected you can automatically replace all of the layers in the project using a single right click browse and click if you follow a couple of rules.
The AI file must have exactly the same layer names, number of layers, and layers must be exactly the same size
The AI file must have exactly the same name
The replacement file must be in a different folder
Follow those rules and you can just open the Illustrator template, select the folder with your replacement footage, and then select one of the layers in the you want to replace and choose replace footage.
A simpler option, the option you described as setting up a bunch of duplicates, would be to create a new folder for each of your versions. Create your master Illustrator file and AE project inside the Master older. Now Copy and paste the original AE file into each of the version folders. Now simply open each Illustrator file inside each version folder and edit the content making sure that you follow the rules above. Now when you open the AE file inside the Version folder you will not have to replace the footage.
Here are a few problems with this workflow. First, your animations may not work if you change the size of any layer in the AI file. Second, you end up with a bunch of duplicate file names on your system. Third, It's hard to keep things straight.
There are other approaches. The first would be to create an animation preset for each of the layers in your master file. Just press UU to reveal all changed properties in a selected layer, select everything that is animated. If there are expressions in the layer make sure the properties with the expressions are also selected then go to the menu and select Animate>Save Animation Preset. When you have all of the animated layers in your composition saved as animation presets you can then start a new AE project, import your AI file as a composition exactly as you did before, and then select the layers one at a time and apply the animation presets to the appropriate layers.
This avoids the duplicate file name issue and allows a different version for each Project.
Another option is to use scripting to create a script that replaces all layers in a composition with a new source file. Here again, you must design your animation to either work with layers of different sizes or all of the layers in the new footage must be exactly the same size as the original master AI file.
Probably the best option would be to design your project so that the majority of the layers would be the same and come from a master file, then add another file that contains only the elements that you want to change. Most of my template projects involve text changes only and the text does not come from Illustrator, it comes from text layers. I'm referring to lower thirds. In that case I use a script that creates comps from spreadsheets. I simply load up the master template file with the master artwork, have a spreadsheet created with the data I need to replace, then run the script and a project with a bunch of new comps is automatically created and sent to the render cue to create the digital intermediates or sent to the Adobe Media Encoder for rendering the deliverable files.
To tell you the absolute truth, most of the work that I do that seems to be kind of like the work you are describing just involves opening an Illustrator file as a comp and applying a few animation presets to the layers. I have about 300 custom animation presets in my library that can be used on any layer of any size to create motion. Here's one of my favorites. It causes any sized layer at any scale to fly in, bounce then drop out of the frame no matter what size the comp. The only thing you have to set is the in and out point of the layer.
Dropbox - flyInBounceDropOut.ffx