• Adobe After Effects

  Pasting Path Keyframes Causes Animation to Move Position

  Posted by Charlie Coile on January 21, 2020 at 4:24 pm

  I’m trying to animate a line across the screen that morphs into an arch, a thumbs-up, and a tangle before returning to the original line. I drew each path in Illustrator as separate layers so that each one is in the position I want in the final animation.

  My issue is that after I create vector layers from my thumb, arch, and so on, I can’t copy and paste path keyframes without the shape changing positions from my original design.

  
  Here are all the importated layers with paths in the correct position.

  
  After creating vector layers, I go into the path settings of “Ethernet Outlines” and set a keyframe. I jump ahead a second and go to the path for “Tangle Outlines.” I copy the keyframe, which appears to still line up correctly.

  
  Oops, when I paste the keyframe copied from “Tangled Outlines” into “Ethernet Outlines” it morphs the line from its origional postion to way off screen. Yikes!

  After poking through the archives and watching a slew of video tutorials, I’m still absolutely stumped. Any help would be very appreciated!

  I’m a relatively new AE user, and I’m working in CC 17.0.2 on a Mac with High Sierra 10.13.6.

  Charlie Coile replied 6 years, 6 months ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Charlie Coile

  January 23, 2020 at 4:21 pm

  I have a hunch that my problem stems from the varied sizes of the layers. I went into Illustrator and made each layer the same by connecting the path ends outside of the artboard so that each shape had the same width and height. For example:

  

  This prevented the paths from jumping around the screen when I copied each path keyframe into one layer’s path. Progress!

  However, the number of points varies so much from shape to shape, that things get wonky even when I set the first vertex or change the direction of the path in Illustrator and reload the footage.

  Phooey.

  UPDATE! I found a solution, but I’m not sure why it works. I put a rectangle in each of the Illustrator layers, gave each a stroke, and reloaded the footage in AE. When I created vector layers from the new files, they contained two groups, one for the rectangle around the frame and a second for the path I want to animate.

  For some reason, when I copied the paths as keyframes into one layer, they stayed put. Well, they bumped a little to the right, but nudging the position was simple. All I had to do was take the stoke out of the first group and everything looked great.

  Could anyone explain/point me to a tutorial on why this worked?

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