Mask Shape keyframes > Roving

[Todd Kopriva]

“Roving keyframes are available only for spatial layer properties, such as Position, Anchor Point, and effect control points.”

So, setting mask shape keyframes to roving won’t accomplish anything.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Greg Digenti]

Thanks, but that doesn’t solve my issue. I want to make all of my Mask Shape keyframes equidistant from each other, and changing them to roving was just all I could think of.

Anyone else have a solution?

[Stuart Elith]

Why do you want them to be equidistant? This may help us to understand what you are trying to achieve, and therefore, a solution… I’m not sure what you’re even doing, is it rotoscoping footage? Drawing abstract shapes?

Equidistant keyframes will not necessarily give you a smoother result – when roto’ing, one of the main methods I use is to find where the movement/motion changes direction, and set these up as the first key frames. These will not usually be evenly spaced out along the clip.

Is there any reason you can’t just drag them to be evenly spaced?
If you wanted it to be precisely even, you could go to the start of your clip, position the first keyframe, go to the next frame, position your next, and put them all on subsequent frames, then select them all, hold Alt and drag out the last one – this will stretch them all out.

But I don’t see what that would achieve… the mask shapes won’t match up with the footage. Assuming you are even trying to roto something…

[Greg Digenti]

I guess if there isn’t any way to do this with a command — which it appears there’s not — I guess your suggestion on how to make make the distance between them equal will work. It’s just that there’s a few hundred keyframes, so I was hoping there was a more automated solution.

With the robost alignment tools Adobe has for Illustrator and Photoshop, I just assumed I wasn’t seeing it for After Effects.

BTW, they’re all hold keyframes, so smoothness isn’t an issue. The mask is being used to reveal a long, winding line of colored boxes created in Illustrator, and I wanted them to appear in an orderly fashion.

Thanks for your help.

[Stuart Elith]

Ahh right. Well, i can’t really think of a more elegant solution :/

This is the kind of thing that someone may have written a script to deal with. Scripts are great ways to extend AE, particularly in workflow/useability stuff like this. I had a quick skim and didn’t find anything, but if you search for after effects scripts you may find something. AEnhancers, aescripts and redefinery are all great resources.

[Greg Digenti]

I hate to admit it, but once I went through and aligned all of the keyframes the way you suggested and watched the render, I realized I did have to grab portions of them and squeeze or stretch them to match the camera movement. Hmmm…

But it would be nice if there was a way to initially space them out equally.