Motion path
The trail a moving layer leaves on the canvas, with handles you drag right there to bend its trajectory and shape how it eases along it.
Select a single layer that has two or more Position keyframes while in Animate mode, and its motion path appears on the canvas: a dotted trail tracing every pose it passes through, from its first Position key to its last. It is the fastest way to see and reshape a move without opening a panel.
Reading the path
The trail is drawn in the layer's own colour: its colour group when one is assigned, otherwise a muted blue-grey. A layer therefore reads as one colour from its duration bar in the timeline through to its path on the canvas, and two layers shown at once are told apart at a glance. Every mark is drawn over a dark halo so it stays legible on a white canvas.
Every frame between the first and last Position key gets a small dot; each keyframe itself gets a square mark. Dots packed close together mean the layer is covering little ground per frame, a slow patch of the move, and dots spread further apart mean it is moving fast. Reading the spacing tells you the timing before you even scrub the playhead.
Spatial handles
Each keyframe mark carries up to two handles on thin lines: one for the segment leaving it, one for the segment arriving. The first key has no incoming handle and the last has no outgoing one, since neither has a neighbour on that side. Drag a handle and the path bends toward it, the same way a bezier handle bends a drawn curve, so a straight hop between two poses can become an arc.
Dragging a plain dot instead of a keyframe mark creates a new keyframe there first, seeded with the value the path was already passing through, so the curve does not jump, and then moves it.
How a handle's length relates to the easing
A handle's direction bends the path; its length is the same number as that segment's time easing. Pull a handle out longer and the layer eases into or out of that keyframe more slowly; pull it in shorter and the timing snaps. Drag the handle and the length you set is written straight into the segment's custom bezier curve, and the reverse is just as true, so reshaping the curve in the Easing panel or the Graph Editor moves the same handle back here.
If the segment was using a preset like Linear or an Ease In/Out rather than a hand-shaped curve, grabbing its handle converts it to a custom bezier automatically, starting from an equivalent curve so the timing does not change the instant you touch it.
The keyframe right-click menu
Right-click a square keyframe mark on the path for six commands: three that shape the path, then Easing, Keyframe Interval and Delete Keyframe.
| Item | What it does |
|---|---|
| Create Path Line | Builds a real Shape layer that traces the whole path, named after the layer with Path appended |
| Reset Bezier | Retracts both spatial handles on this key, so the path runs straight through it again. Greyed out when the key is not bent |
| Smooth Bezier | Auto-tangents the key: the direction comes from the chord between its two neighbours, so the corner rounds off instead of kinking, and each handle is a third of the length of the segment beside it |
| Easing | A submenu of the same nine presets as everywhere else, applied to this key |
| Keyframe Interval | A submenu of 1 to 8, holding the outgoing segment on twos, threes and so on |
| Delete Keyframe | Removes this Position key |
Create Path Line needs two Position keyframes to have anything to trace. The new shape is an open path with no fill and a 2 pixel light-grey stroke, dropped in as a sibling directly above the layer that owns the motion, which is the space its points are authored in. Its nodes come across Sharp, with the handles copied verbatim from the motion path rather than re-aligned by the Smart or Smooth rules.