• Adobe After Effects

  Write on effect doesn’t show motion path anymore on AE CC

  Posted by Byron Stanford on January 21, 2016 at 7:13 pm

  Hi everyone,

  hope you can help me out. I’ve been an avid reader of these forums and always have seemed to find the right answer for any problem I’ve had in the past. This one, however, has me stumped.

  So yesterday I was working on a composition where I wanted to reveal a word with the write on effect to make it seem as it’s being drawn on the screen. I applied the effect, and got about half way done without any hiccups. Every time I moved the timeline and dragged the final point marker, the line would show handles to customize the curves the effect had to make. I saved my project and quit out of AE.

  Today when I returned, the line isn’t there. The only thing I have is the final point for the brush position (a circle with a + inside). I can no longer see the path I saw yesterday and can’t edit any of the curves, add points, or anything that I was doing yesterday. When I select the Pen or Convert Vertex tools, they act just like the normal arrow, only dragging the final point.

  I’ve gone through the forums and checked that RotoBeizer isn’t on, I also have Motion Paths on in the View Options and changing the temporal interpolation on the keyframes from Linear to Bezier or Auto Bezier is not changing anything. I’ve even created new projects and started over from scratch and still can’t get the effect to show as it was yesterday. I doubt that I changed any settings, but don’t discard it. I just find it weird that the effect is not behaving like yesterday.

  This is my first time using this effect, so maybe I’m missing something. Hope you guys have encountered this before or know what’s going on.

  Thanks in advance for the help!

  Byron Stanford replied 10 years, 4 months ago 54,680 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Byron Stanford

  January 21, 2016 at 8:48 pm

  Hi Dave,

  thanks for your response. However, that is not how I created the first part of the motion path. I just tried doing that a moment ago, but because of how intricate the letters I want to reveal with the effect are, doing it as a mask isn’t helping. I copy and then paste to the brush position and find that I need to make a lot of adjustments, and because now I can’t see the path, anchors or handles, I can’t fine tune it.

  I really don’t know how this could have happened. It’s like yesterday the effect worked in one way and now it works in a completely different way. Or maybe I did something yesterday I can’t remember!

  thanks for the help though.
• 

  Byron Stanford

  January 21, 2016 at 9:02 pm

  Nothing, I’ve tried highlighting the effect, the brush position, the layer… even deleted all my preferences. Nothing. This is what it looks like right now. Yesterday I could see the motion path as if it were a mask path and edit any of the points, make the lines curve in the direction I wanted… today I can’t even control how they curve, which is really annoying.

  

  Is there maybe a different method to make it appear as these letters are being drawn on? Ultimately I want to used this layer as an matte to reveal the video underneath it.

  Thanks again!

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