• Adobe After Effects

  Masking off moving text with a feathered transparent mask

  Posted by Col De catford on July 24, 2012 at 1:33 pm

  Hi there,

  Have had a good look & can’t find the answer to this one – so here goes:

  I’m going to animate some titles going over footage. Each titles slide needs to exit from the side but I want them to disappear through a feathered mask within the frame rather than just off the edge – kind of like this:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsm9g316h6Y

  Can’t quite work out how to do this – if I put a mask over the text it doesn’t stay put, and I can’t use a coloured vignette as i dont want to disturb the footage below.

  Any help much appreciated.

  Cheers,
  Chris

  Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

  This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

  Darby Edelen replied 14 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  John Cuevas

  July 24, 2012 at 2:22 pm

  If your project isn’t quite as complicated as the Bourne credits, you could place a solid over your text layer, mask the area where the text will be visible and add a feather. Now on your text layer change it’s track matte to “Alpha”

  You may need to create a solid mask/feather setup for each layer of text if different layers of text are moving off in different directions.

  Johnny Cuevas, Editor
  Thinkck.com

  “I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
  —THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.
• 

  Col De catford

  July 24, 2012 at 2:53 pm

  That’s the one! Many thanks dude.
  Chris
• 

  Darby Edelen

  July 24, 2012 at 3:54 pm

  There are a few solutions. John covered a good one, but if you have lots of text layers it can grow unwieldy.

  Another option would be to pre-compose your text layers, create your gradient layer above them in this pre-comp and enable its “Preserve Transparency” switch (in between the blend mode and track matte drop downs on the layer).

  Yet another option would be to pre-compose the text, then make your gradient in the main composition, apply the ‘Set Matte’ effect to the gradient layer and point it to the text pre-comp. This option would work well if, for example, you needed your text pre-comp to have collapse transformations enabled as preserve transparency won’t work in that case.

  Darby Edelen

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up