• Adobe After Effects

  Any way to control a mask with tracking data?

  Posted by Markp on February 16, 2006 at 3:44 pm

  Hi folks.

  I’m about to start working with a quantity of aerial footage of city landscapes, and I need to be able to matte out individual tall buildings in the foreground.
  I’m wondering about ways to avoid a lot of tedious rotoscoping with animated masks.

  The footage is well defined, and I can easily track the corners of the buildings.

  However, I don’t think it’s possible to access the mask data to animate individual mask points, only animate the overall shape of the mask.
  Perhaps someone can confirm this?

  I’m currently using AE 6.5: have any such enhancements to masking been added in AE 7?

  – Or, does anyone have any other good ideas about using tracking data as a way to accurately matte out foreground objects? I have already considered corner pinning a matte layer to the edges of buildings as they are all basically composed of flat planes; and then wiring the corner pins to keyframes tracking the corners of the actual buidlings, via expressions.

  Many thanks in advance for any thoughts / suggestions
  – Mark

  Markp replied 20 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Mylenium

  February 16, 2006 at 4:31 pm

  No, even AE 7 does not natively provide access to masks with expressions, trackers etc.. If you search this forum however, you will find many threads pointing you in the right direction. This topic has been discussed several times.

  Mylenium

  [Pour Myl
• 

  Markp

  February 16, 2006 at 4:48 pm

  Many thanks…
• 

  Thehardmenpath

  February 17, 2006 at 12:11 am

  Steve Kilisky said in the podcast interview that they check this forum often for user demands. I hope they notice how often this issue has appeared in the last months.

  Check out these links:

  https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=871409

  A bit of info and a link to my humble rototracking script. It does what you want, but has some bugs.

  https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=870042

  Another very interesting script that attaches a vertex to a solid:
• 

  Markp

  February 17, 2006 at 9:26 am

  thehardmenpath – Many thanks for your advice.

  On the earlier prompt to search, I actually found the script yesterday. Got hold of it, tried it; on initial inspection, it looks pretty much like what I want to do.

  The exciting world of AE scripts, huh?
  A whole new interesting area to explore…

  Regards –
  M

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