Size a vector logo in Adobe Illustrator

- Since vector logos are the preferred format, let's begin with a simple sizing operation to get the graphic to correct target size and pixel count. What I'd like to show you first is bringing in a graphic into Premier Pro with no sizing done in advance. Let's import the file as is. Here it is, and I'll click Import. Let's create a New Sequence. And I'll set this to a 4K delivery format. If I drop the logo in, you're going to notice that in this case, it's pretty small. Now, of course, we can come over to the controls here for effect controls and scale, but I want you to pay attention to what happens with this vector logo as we scale it up. Now it looks pretty good here, but let's view this at 100% so we can more accurately judge what's actually happening under the hood. And what you'll notice here is when viewed at 100% it becomes very evident that those pixels are not very clean. That's because Adobe Premiere Pro doesn't understand vector files. If you give it a vector file, it immediately rasterizes it, converting it into pixels, and creates something that's pretty difficult to use. Now, let's select this logo here, and I'll simply reveal this in the Finder. You can also reveal on your computer desktop. And what we're going to do is open that up in Illustrator. Here we go. Now, it's time to save this in a correct size. Once the file opens, select it. You can do this by pressing Command or Control A, and then Edit, Copy. Now, choose File, New. From the preset list, you'll find several different formats available. I'm going to chose Film and Video, and here you'll find different settings available. If you don't see the size you need, click View All Presets to view all of the templates available. In this case, let's go with the 4K Ultra High Definition, and I'll click Create. This makes a new document and gives me some action safe and title safe guides to help with placement. Now, these are based on the older standard, so they're actually a bit more conservative than need be. So, I could push the logo closer to this outermost box and still be okay for most broadcast formats. Let's choose Edit, Paste in Front. That drops it in. Now, I will place that right in the corner there, and hold down the Shift key, and grab the edge and scale. Now as I do, the logo gets larger. There we go. Let's nudge that into place. There we go. Now, once you've done this, you'll be able to see the file. It's currently being placed over the transparent background. Now if you take a look at that, that's okay. You get a pretty good idea of what's happening there. Now, what I'm going to do is twirl this down and take a look at the pieces here for a moment. Let's just build this up. I'll turn on the group, and start to enable pieces. There we go. Those are fine. There's the individual letters. And then, here's some more parts. So let's twirl this down and take a look. What I'm seeing here are individual components. So, here is the red box, and it's got a stroke on it, but it's not quite thick enough. I'll go over to Properties here with that selected, and adjust the thickness of the stroke. You see as I increase that, it gets thicker, and ready for video. That's looking a lot better. Now, we've got a nice, thick stroke. Let's go back to Layers, and we'll find the word, vector. There is is. Jump on over to Properties and do the same thing. Let's give it a similar stroke of 18 points, and you see it takes on the thicker size. If lines are too thin in video projects, they can be problematic leading to a lot of shimmer. Now that looks pretty good. I'll choose File, Save As, and check my settings. It's RGB, which is correct, and I'm going to store this inside of folder 2.1. Let's call this Logo Prepped. You can click on the previous file name, and choose to save over it with a new optimized file. I suggest creating a PDF compatible file, but you can lose compression. And when you click Okay, it's going to store a file that's ready for import into tools like Premiere Pro or After Effects. Now, switch on over to Premiere Pro, and let's import that. I'll click on the current logo and just press Delete to remove it from my project. And now I can choose File, Import. Let's choose that optimized Prepped Logo, and bring it in, and we can drop that into our sequence. There it is. You see that it's correctly scaled, and if we drag through and look at that, everything has been drawn in nice, crisp lines. Now this has become a raster graphic again, but because it was sized correctly inside of Adobe Illustrator, it comes in correctly into Premiere Pro. Let's view this over transparent pixels for a second. There is is. And we'll set this back to fit, and if I press Play, you see that its there in the timeline, ready for use. Now, once you've dropped the logo in at the correct size, you can take advantage of the Motion panel, or Transitions to animate it. Let me show you a few simple things. With the logo selected, I'll just click on Effect Controls, and I can see the motion effect. Let's add a quick keyframe here for scale. And I'll jump forward just a little bit in time, and add one more. And we can quickly scale that logo from zero to 100; you see it grows up. Let's add one more transition here. I'll go to the Effects tab. I'll add the 3D effect for a basic 3D, and let's just put a small movement on this. Put a little bit of Swivel and Tilt. There we go. Come back to the beginning, and set that at an angle of 90 and 90. And now you'll see that it rotates into place and lands, along with the scale, creating a nice simple effect. Let's view that over a transparent background so it's a little easier to see right now. And you'll notice that the logo has a basic animation that works correctly. This is simple now. It's just like any other piece of footage, but the vector file has been optimized and correctly sized for use in a Premiere Pro project.