Opening After Effects projects
Premation opens After Effects project files directly — both .aep and the XML
form, .aepx. This arrived in 0.8.5.
File ▸ Open After Effects Project…, choose the file, and the project is converted into a native Premation document. From then on it is ordinary editing: nothing stays linked to the original, and Premation never writes back to it.
Opening an After Effects project needs the desktop app, because the engine reads the file from its place on disk.
It is a conversion, with a report
An .aep is Adobe’s format for Adobe’s renderer, and Premation’s engine is a
different renderer. So this is a conversion, not a round trip: it carries
across everything it has an equivalent for and tells you plainly what it could
not. If nothing was lost you get a short “Opened …” notice and no dialog — a
dialog on every success would teach you to dismiss dialogs without reading them.
If anything was not carried across, an After Effects import report opens with
the counts first (so you can check them against the project open in After
Effects next door), then a plain list of everything that did not survive the trip.
The import starts a new untitled project, so your first Save asks where to put it rather than overwriting a file After Effects still needs to open. If you have unsaved changes, you are asked before they are discarded.
The whole import is a single undo entry.
What comes across
| Notes | |
|---|---|
| Compositions | Size, frame rate, duration, background, work area and motion blur settings, for every composition in the project |
| Layers | Names, stacking order, in and out points, start time, parenting, the layer switches, label colour, blend mode and track matte |
| Transforms | Anchor point, position, scale, rotation, orientation and opacity — static and keyframed, with their easing |
| Keyframes | Times, values, hold, linear and Bézier interpolation, temporal eases, spatial tangents and roving |
| Masks | Outline, mode, inversion, feather, opacity and expansion |
| Text | The string, font, size, fill colour, justification and tracking |
| Effects | Matched to Premation’s own by name, with parameters matched by label |
| Footage | Relinked by file name where it can be found, and listed in the report where it cannot |
| Nested compositions | A composition used as a layer becomes a composition layer pointing at the imported composition |
| Expressions | Carried as text on the property that had them. They are not evaluated on import; open the property and re-enable the expression to run it here |
Missing footage
A project with missing media still opens. Files are relinked by name where Premation can find them; the ones it cannot are named in the import report, so you know exactly what to point at. Use Relink on the missing assets afterwards.
What does not come across
The report names these rather than dropping them silently:
- Shape layers arrive as groups that keep their transform, effects and children, but the vector contents inside are not converted yet.
- Animated masks import their first shape only.
- A text layer with mixed character styling takes the first style for the whole layer.
- Third-party effects with no equivalent are skipped, and the report says how many and which.
- Camera and light layers come across as layers, but their After Effects-specific options are not mapped parameter for parameter.
- Expressions are text, not running expressions, as above.
Check the result against the original before you rely on it. The import gets the structure, timing and most of the look right; it is the report’s list, not a blank dialog, that tells you where a hand-fix is needed.