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Inspiring
February 13, 2023
Question

I have a shape layer animating up and down with just one keyframe. How is this possible?

  • February 13, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 1019 views

Hi. I'm working on editing a large Figma project that includes some animations done in After Effects.

My knowledge of After Effects is pretty basic.

There's one issue I'm running into that I can't figure out and was hoping someone here might have the answer.

There's a rectangle shape layer (named: Rectangle 4945).

The comp is 5 seconds long.

When previewing the comp, Rectangle 4945 moves up vertically and at 0:00:02:19 it changes direction and moves down vertically towards where it started from.

Indeed, if I check it's Position property, there's a keyframe at 0:00:02:19 set to the Y position where it changes direction.

However, it's the ONLY keyframe. I was expecting to see a keyframe at the beginning of the comp with Y set to its starting vertical position and another keyframe at the end with Y set to its end vertical position, but there are no other keyframes except for the one at ...02:19. 

Here is the layer with playhead at first frame. Note position is -95.9, 514.9 and there's no keyframe there.

Here is the layer with playhead at 0:00:02:19, where there's a keyframe. Notice that now the position is now -95.9, 438.9

At the end of the animation, as in the first frame, there is no keyframe either, yet the Y position at this point changed and is now 515.1.

 

It did not escape me that Rectangle 4945 is linked to a parent layer - "Null 132". But I checked and Null 132 has no animations at all. I seleted Null 132 and hit the key U and nothing showed up. I expanded the Transform properties and I see no keyframes. So the vertical animation is not being brought in from a linked layer

 

I can't figure out how Rectangle 4945 is moving up and then down again with just one keyframe.

The epxression for Position is just the standard "transform.position"

Any ideas?

The only thing I can think of is when I opened the AEP file, I was prompted to convert to the most recent version of After Effects, so maybe this was created in an earlier version and somehow this is causing the start and end keyframes not to appear?

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

Inspiring
February 15, 2023

Hi all,

339 views and no solutions.... 

Should I assume there's some sort of corruption going on? 

As I said, I had to convert the AEP upon opening it since it was created in an earlier version. Could that have messed things up?

Mylenium
Legend
February 14, 2023

The jittery motion would indicate that somehow there are expressions involved, but you other screenshots seem to disprove that theory. At the same time something must be animated somewhere... This is puzzling.

 

Mylenium 

Inspiring
February 14, 2023

The jittery motion is because I just dragged the playhead across manually. Hitting space was conflicting with a keybaord shortcut assinged to the screen capture app and was messing things up . Probably could have solved it easily, but just went ahead and dragged it manually. I assure you it plays smoothly when previewing.

Mylenium
Legend
February 14, 2023

Well, the scale is animated, too, isn't it? If the shape isn't centered, the scaling could make it appaear as if an isolated shape is moving. The rest we can't know. You've basically made your screenshots useless by not showing us the actual composition with the shape selected so we cannot deduce more than that guess.

 

Mylenium

Inspiring
February 14, 2023

Hi.

I added a screenshot of all layers, and with the shape layer in question expanded.

Also added an animated GIF of the preview, focusing specifically on the shape animation while I dragged the playhead across the timeline. I'm not showing the entire thing for sake of privacy for the client, .

Please let me know if I misunderstood what you need.