How Do I make curved lines with the pen tool in after effects CS6

[ClockWorksCity]

Hello, so I have been following this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKzB-CFT0MI on how to make 2d intros in after effects and at the 2:20 mark he shows how he uses the pen tool to make curved lines around the elipse. I tried to do the samething myself, and couldent make the curved lines. I looked it up online and there were tutorials on how to make curved lines but they did not work the same way, and I could not make curves like he did.So if any of you know how to do curved lines like in the video, your help will be appreciated.

Thanks !

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

If you have standard bezier selected (rotobezier unchecked) then you click and drag to pull out bezier handles. There is a lot of info in AE's help files on masking. Please look there for more details. The pen tool works the same way in AE as it does in Illustrator or Photoshop or just about any other vector drawing program. Here is a little video I made a long time ago that shows how to draw and animate a bezier path with the pen tool.

Edit: You are right Mylenium, the original tutorial was an awful demonstration that I did a long time ago. I posted the wrong tutorial. This one is better. I've got some great editing mask tutorials coming soon.

[DTVPerth]

This tutorial rocked Rick. Helped me with a basic issue I was having with line vs shape creation and associated trim path animations. Thanks!

[Mylenium]

Goodness, what an awful tutorial.... Simply hold down the mouse while drawing to create bezier curves with tnagent handles instead of just straight segments...

Mylenium

[Lorikaplan123]

after i create a curved path, the next place i click to make another point , the path to the next point is curved. how do i fix this?

[Rick Gerard]

This is basic stuff and it's basically the same way Illustrator or Photoshop works with bezier paths. You'll find a lot of helpful information if you just type masking or mask in the Search After Effects Help field at the top right corner of the app.

Adobe - Search: masking

Directly from the Help Files: After Effects Help | Creating shapes and masks

Mylenium.. sorry you thought it was an awful tutorial. I made it in under a minute just to show this member the very basic task of creating a mask with the pen tool and animating the shape. I'll try and up the quality of my quick replies to simple operations.