Update August 2023: the script now works with animated masks as well, producing animated paths.

If you work with both Illustrator and After Effects you know when copying a vector object from AI and pasting it into an AE layer it will show up as masks – sometimes can be hundreds of masks depending on the complexity of the AI vector.

This script was developed to quickly convert all masks into paths that can be later extensively animated. If you work with Illustrator just copy an AI vector and paste into an empty shape layer in AE, then run the script to transform the masks into paths.

It will work with one or multiple selected shape layers, converting all masks each has into paths.