The "continuously rasterize" icon is causing the gradient colors to change in my 2d comp

Hi @dan_relate ,

There are a few things going on here. First, to add some clarity to something that's somewhat confusing, the sun icon you're referring to is only Continuously Rasterize when it's on a footage layer containing vector data (like an Illustrator layer). It's visible but grayed out on Shape Layers because those are always vector layers.

When the same switch is flipped on a pre-comp, it's actually called "Collapse Transformations" and this feature essentially brings the entire contents of the pre-comp into your parent comp. A great way to understand this is if you setup a 3D scene with lots of depth, then you pre-comp it. Once it's a pre-comp, the whole scene becomes flat as a postcard when rotated in 3D space. However, if you enable Collapse Transformations, you're bringing the 3D scene into your main comp. Here's a great School of Motion article that explains these two features: https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/collapse-transformations-continuously-rasterize-after-effects

So unless you have a good reason to, you should try disabling Collapse Transformations on the pre-comps.

Regarding the jagged text: take a look at the switches to the right of your layer names. The ones with the dotted diagnoal line have been changed to Draft Quality. This setting used to be much more helpful for performance on older machines, but any modern machine should be able to handle your comp (based on the screenshots I'm seeing) with the quality set to Full. Just select all your layers and click one of the switches until they're all back to a solid line. This willl get rid of the jagged text.

After you remove those two factors, let me know if you're still having an issue with the gradient. Depending on how you created the gradient, this could fix the issue and the School of Motion article will shed light on why this is happening.

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team