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Known Participant
November 5, 2025
Open for Voting

[Request] A way to handle overlapping motion paths without going crazy.

  • November 5, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 38 views

Hello.
Thank you for considering this suggestion.

When working with character animations inside After Effects, it often happens that some motion paths overlap each other (for example when a character swings its arms or moves its hand).
The very serious issue is that After Effects does not provide a way to handle the keyframes themselves precisely.

Most of the times, when I select a keyframe in the viewport, After Effects selects an other one close by,  making ajusting keyframes that are in very close proximity borderline impossible.
Even worse, when I try to adjust a bezier handle, it never gets the right one, and selecting each keyframe to adjust in the timeline doesn't help either.

I'm basically asking for a revision of this system, as it makes character animations inside After Effects needlessly sloppy and frustrating.
One solution would be to enable a toggle to only display the currently selected keyframe, or alongside it's previous and next ones.

I provided an example of what I'm talking about, in the video below.
You can see I'm fumbling and failing to be precise, especially since After Effects does not allow zooming any further (2, or 3 additional levels of zoom would mitigate this issue).

 

I must have had this problem for more than 10 years, and I'm starting to grow tired of the endless frustration, especially since After Effects it's shifting its focus on 3D, instead of updating its core functionality which made the software popular in the first place.
I love After Effects, and I have been using it nonstop since 2008, but some of its core tools really need to be updated.

Cheers,
Filippo.

Thank you very much.

1 reply

Participating Frequently
November 5, 2025

Your suggestion actually makes a lot of sense. A toggle to show only the currently selected keyframe (and maybe its neighbors) would be a huge usability boost. It’d declutter the view and make fine-tuning poses so much easier. Even something as simple as a “solo selected property’s motion path” option could solve 90% of this.

Here are a few other quality-of-life improvements that could help if Adobe ever revisits this part of AE:

  • Smart keyframe selection priority – AE could give priority to the keyframe under your cursor, rather than one that happens to be nearby on another path.

  • Temporary isolate mode – like how you can solo layers, being able to isolate one motion path or property (say, “Position (Left Hand)”) would make precise adjustments way less painful.

  • Bezier handle snapping toggle – so you can temporarily disable snapping when adjusting dense keyframes, avoiding that annoying “grabs the wrong handle” problem.

  • Keyframe editor overlay – a small floating zoomed-in window showing just the selected keyframes in detail.