How to inset/taper rectangle top uniformly?

[Jesse29764343hb13]

Hello, so I've created a rectangle, and I'd like the top left & right corners inset, say...  8 pixels on both the left & right side.  What would be the best way to do so?

I can use the pen tool and manipulate each anchor point individually, guesstimating visually how far I've inset each one, but is there a better way?  I'd like to be able to use something to inset the top left & right anchor points by, say...  8 pixels.  How would I do so?  I can select each one with the pen tool individually, and use the left and right arrow pad buttons to do a specific amount, but it seems very tedious.  Is there a better way?  I'd imagine there should be a way to select each anchor point, and specify it's absolute X/Y values, but it only seems to work for the overall shape?

Thanks for any help!

[thepixelsmith]

In Ae you can't directly access the position properties of vertices (anchor points) in the interface.

So there is no way I have ever seen of doing this natively that isn't tedious.

In most situations I would probably just do what you suggested using the arrow keys:

1. Select the two anchor points at the top of the rectangle

2. Double-click on one of them to add a bounding box to transform them.

3. Hold Cmd (ctrl if yo are on windows) and drag the one of the Anchor points towards the other. They will both scale towards the center. 

But this makes you do it by eye.

There are addons like penpal (https://aescripts.com/penpal/)  that can make it easier to work with vertices in AE but they aren't free.

[Mylenium]

Create Nulls for the mask using the respective script function, animate the Null positions.

Mylenium

[thepixelsmith]

This may work.

1. Make a solid layer to the dimensions you want your square/rectangle to be.

2. Add the Corner Pin effect to it.

3. The effect lets you adjust the position of the coeners using pixel values

If you really want to use a shape layer I would precomp it otherwise Corner pin tends to offset it's position.